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9 STOOGES MC5 IGGY HARRY CREWS ® 















MICHIGAN'S SOURCE FOR 
INDEPENDENT AND IMPORT 

ROCK 

SCHOOLKIDS' IS COMMITTED 
TO CARRYING THE MOST 
COMPREHENSIVE SELECTION 
OF MUSIC IN MICHIGAN 


523 E. LIBERTY HOURS: 

ANN ARBOR, Ml 48104 MON - SAT 10am -9:30pm 

(313)994-8031 SUNDAY Noon - 8pm 


A Ditch Gang Production (2018) 


NUMBER 

FIVE 


WINTER 

1990 



EIGHTIES 


NINETIES 


STAFF 

MINISTER OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE 

Dancey 

MINISTER OF ABSTENTLA 

Plotnick 

MINISTRY OF DIS INFORMATION 

Mike Rubin 
Barry Henssler 
Rob Michaels 

FREE BOOT PEOPLES’ PARTY 

Emil Bacilla 
Peter Bagge 
Amy Case 
Wendy Case 
Lloyd Dangle 
Mike Danner 
Phil Durr 
Chris Enright 
Jeff Green 
Steven Humbert 
Teny LaBan 
Eric Lorey 
Sue Lott 
Rick McGinnis 
Pete Meyer 
Galidan Nauber 
William Neff 
Matt O’ Brien 
Kevin Plamondon 
Rachel Plecas 
The Pizz 
Phil Saunders 


CONTENTS 

Undie Rock in Review (p.13) 
Suck-O-Meter™ Survey Number One (p.34) 

A Secret History Of Detroit Rock (p.23) 
Love Letters To Clawhammer tp.40) 

The Last Temptation Of Dave Van Dube (p.78) 
A Secret History Of Ron Asheton (p.35) 
Unshitty Records by Bored!, The God Bulllies. 
The Cosmic Psychos, Surgery, L7, Booger 
Sugar, Vertigo, The Melvins and 
Football Dick (p. 80) 

David Duke's Do The While Thing (p.82) 
Hardcore '90: Better Never Than Late (p. 83) 
The Naked Truth About The MC5 (p. 39) 
Take A Shower With Jeff (p. 45) 

Harry Crews: Destination Poon (p. 50) 
Wunnerful World of Wig (p. 63) 

The Visual Addictions 
of Robert "Bob" Williams (p. 56) 
Wendler Whizzes With The Nuge (p. 67) 
Danny Digs Bomb And Loop (p. 90) 

The Crack Etiquette Primer (p. 44) 

The Perenially Posing Glenn Danzig (p. 66) 
The Making Of Steel Belted Romeos (p. 57) 
The Edible Page (p.99) 

Nelson DeLa Rosa: Not Just Another 
22-Inch Tall Naturalist Rollerblader (p.3) 

BACK ISSUES 

No, no, no. Every last arborcidal issue is 
completely sold out. 

MOTORBOOTY WORLD-WIDE 
COMMUNICATIONS 
P.O. BOX 7944 
ANN ARBOR MI 48107 


MOTORBOOTY # 5 , Winter 1990. MOTORBOOTY Magazine, "The Bub’s Daddy of the Bozo Undergroundis 
published sporadically by Clownskull Graphics, in the proud home of Marcel Marceau International Mime Center. Entire 
contents © 1990 MOTORBOOTY Magazine and respective authors, protected with fanatical zeal by four-eyed attorneys. 
Any similarity between "real" persons or hopelessly date-less undie rock record reviewers and the contents of 
MOTORBOOTY is purely hallucinatory. Four-issue subscriptions available for twelve dollars. All correspondence and 
other hilariously mispelled missives should be directed to our Global Headquarters at the address above, but those coveted 
advertising rate cards and T-shirts are available exclusively from MOTORBOOTY WEST, P.O. Box 460472, San 
Francisco, CA, 94146. 










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BY MIKE “RUBIN" RUBIN 


The name Warren. "Sonny" Sharrock 
may as yet be criminally unfamiliar to all 
but the most astute followers of really- 
fucked-up guitar noise, but his brand of 
unfettered 6-string mayhem is just too 
damn loudlvital to remain relatively 
anonymous for long. A veteran of the 
New York free jazz movement of the late 
'60s which included Albert Ayler, Cecil 
Taylor, and Archie Shepp, Sharrock 
worked with Pharoah Sanders on the 
seminal Tauhid LP (the early MC5 used to 
perform a piece based on the song "Upper 
Egypt and Lower Egypt" from that album, 
and Iggy Pop has listed it as one of the 
major influences on the Stooges), as well 
as with Miles Davis and honky 


flutemeister Herbie Mann, though he is 
best known for his recent work with the 
jazz "supergroup" Last Exit. On three live 
records and one studio LP of jazz-cum- 
metal, metal-cum-jazz, Exit have exuded a 
sonic fuck-all yet to be equalled. Live at 
New York's Knitting Factory this past 
February, the quartet stirred up an 
appropriately apocalyptic din: 
saxophonist Peter Brotzmann squawking 
and bellowing like a garbage barge 
passing by on the East River, Ronald 
Shannon Jackson's drums galloping like 
the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, bassist 
Bill Laswell rumbling below like a tremor 
along a fault line, and Sharrock blending 
crystallinelcrystal-meth harmonics with 
feedback mushroom clouds to achieve 
musical armaggedon, the firmaments 
collapsing and folding unto themselves, 
heaven and earth meeting, and the seven 


seals popping like guitar strings. 

On his own, Sharrock released three 
albums of difficull-to-listen-to 
collaborations with his then-wife Linda, 
combining his guitar electroshock therapy 
with her shrieks/whoops of porno-loop 
ecstasy and fingernail-lo-chalkboard 
intensity on Black Woman (1969), 
Monkey-Pockie-Boo (1970), and Paradise 
(1975). After a virtual musical 
disappearance from the end of the '70s to 
the mid '80s, the last three years have 
seen him re-emerge to release his two best 
solo efforts, the excellent Guitar and 
Seize The Rainbow. More than his earlier 
work, these LPs showcase his unique 
ability to freeze incredible beauty and 
utter brutality in consecutive notes, 
setting off swirling and snarling sparks of 
amplified aumgn and melding a kiss-you- 
on-the-cheek gleam with a club-you-in- 






the-groin growl that has as much to do 
with previous definitions of "jazz" as the 
A-bomb had to do with definitions of 
"weapon." 

When not raking muck with Exit, 
Sharrock spends his time leading his own 
group, the Sonny Sharrock Band (now 
minus the white "blues" singer who 
looked like a refugee from late '70s 
Santana and sounded worse), as well as 
making cameo appearances with outfits as 
various as Material, Machine Gun, and an 
upcoming jazz album by Bill Cosby (yes, 
the Fat Albert guy). We spoke with him at 
his home in Ossining, New York, down 
the road from Sing Sing Prison and 45 
minutes up the Hudson by train. 


U MOTORBOOTY: How’d you get 
started in music? 

■ SHARROCK: I started out singing what 
is now known as “doo-wop,” back in the 
'50s. I started listening to jazz about 
1958 and began liking it more and more. 
The first people I listened to were Dave 
Brubeck, Art Blakey, the Modern Jazz 
Quartet, and then I moved over into Miles 
Davis and started really listening to him 
and John Coltrane. In 1960 I started 
playing, when I was 20 years old. I never 
played rhythm-and-blues, I only sang it. 
When I started playing, I played only 
jazz. That was what I wanted to do. 

■ Did you ever play saxophone? 

■ No, I wanted to, but I had asthma so I 


couldn't do that. It was probably a good 
thing, ’cause I was so much into Coltrane 
I would have tried very hard to get that 
thing. I'm still very much into him, but 
when it translates from what I hear him 
do, into my head and feeling, and out into 
my guitar, it’s a completely different 
thing than it would have been on the 
tenor. I never copied licks, but I loved his 
playing so much it would have been, as 
they say, right up his ass. 

I studied theory for a couple years. I 
wanted to play but I wasn’t able to do it 
yet, so I thought maybe if I studied some 
theory I’d be able to get a handle on what 
I was trying to do. Guitar teachers were 
teaching absolutely nothing, they were 




teaching you how to sound like Johnny 
Smith or one of those cats who were very 
popular at the time, and I wanted to sound 
like Coltrane. I wanted to find out how 
that was done, so I thought maybe the 
road would be to find out what he was 
doing theoretically, but that wasn’t the 
key. Then I moved to New York and met 
Sun Ra, and I asked him if I could study 
with him, and he told me yeah, and I went 
down to his place, and the lesson was 
very brief and very strange. Actually, he 
showed me a couple of movies, and that 
was the end of the lesson. 1 hardly saw 
him at all. 

■ Movies? 

M Yeah, one movie was about his band 
his band in Chicago in the ’40s and ’50s, 
and they were all in white tuxedos and 
shit, when he was doing the big band 
thing, and the other movie he had gotten 
from the public library. I think it was 
How to Make Statues Sing. You know, 
typical Sun Ra fare — Saturday afternoon 
at Sun Ra’s watching movies; what else 
would you watch? 

So, that taught me absolutely nothing, 
but I was sitting there with Marshall 
Allen and Pat Patrick and all the cats from 
his band, and then Olatunji the African 
drummer called. Olatunji needed a guitar 
player for a gig the following week, and 
Pat Patrick said look, there’s a guitar 
player right here, come on, so I got the 
gig. I was scared to death. I didn’t know if 
1 could cut it or not. So 1 went, and 
Olatunji's band was filled with Sun Ra’s 
players, you know, Ronnie Boykins, Pat 
Patrick, Marshall Allen, they were in both 
bands at once because Sun Ra was making 
no money. I played that gig with them, 
and played another gig with them a few 
months later, and in that time 1 started to 
find ways to do what I was hearing. I was 
closer to the musicians, I was hanging out 
at Slug’s every night. Slug’s was the club 
for the new music here in New York back 
in ’65. It was the club where everybody 
played. I mean if they weren’t playing 
they were hanging out there. You’d walk 
in any night and there’s Albert Ayler, and 
you’d stand there and you’d talk to Albert, 
and just by talking to him about the 
weather you’d learn something about 
music. 

Later on I went down to Philadelphia to 
do some gigs with Byard Lancaster’s 
band, and Pharoah Sanders came to the 
gig because he had been in Philly the 
night before with Coltrane. Now for me, 
Coltrane was God, is God, will always be 
God, so I’m standing on stage playing, 
and I open my eyes, and I look and 
there’s Coltrane smiling at me, and I hear 
this horrible noise behind me and it’s 
Pharoah Sanders, coming up behind me, 
blowing his ass off. 1 mean, 1 had never 
heard a sound like this. He almost blew 
me off the stage. And I turned, and I 
started playing with him, and that was it. 
He asked me to join his band and do that 
beautiful music that he wrote, so that was 
it. I was on it. This was October. 1966. 


We did Tauhid the next month. 

■ Did you ever get to play with 
Coltrane? 

■ Very strangely once. He played flute 
one night. I was working with Pharoah 
Sanders and we were down at Slug’s and I 
looked up and he was standing beside me 
playing the flute, and I said, whoa, this is 
heavy. It felt very funny. But I never 
played with him where he was playing 
full-out. I’m sorry to say. 

■ At what point did you come 
upon the sound that you have? 

■ The buzzsaw, the rip. . . It was a 
combination of things. I was very much 
in love with Albert Ayler’s sound, with 
Pharoah’s sound, when Pharoah would do 
that high intensity sound, and of course 
with the playing of Coltrane and the 
melodicism of Miles. All of these things 
were affecting me, and there I was right in 
the midst of it. Now, I like to play along 
with records, it’s a cheap way to play 
with very good bands. So one day I was 
playing along with this Miles record. 
Miles in Europe, and there’s a version of 
“Milestones” on there that’s extremely 
fast, and I’m playing along with it, and at 
that point I could play and make it for 
about 16 bars, and then it would start to 
fade, but I found that if I did a trill on one 
string, I was able to reach certain things, 
and then the sound developed out of that 
trill. That’s when I started working on 
that, playing a repeated note very fast, 
like a buzzsaw, and to overpick the 
string. The lighter you pick, the faster 
you can go, but I pick very heavy. Try 
and make that fast, and you’ll get a sound 
of pulling the string. You’ll get two or 
three notes out of the one string at a 
time, because it’s something about it 
slapping back or something that gives 
you more notes and you get these 
overtones, and it creates a harmonic that’s 
kind of abrasive. It’s an abrasive 
harmonic which is a strange concept in 
itself. I guess that’s what it is. Some 
scientist will figure that shit out when I’m 
dead, but for now that’s where we’ll leave 
it. 

So that’s what happened. I heard it, and 
I said, that is the sound that Pharoah, and 
Coltrane when he’s playing his 
harmonics, and Albert, that’s the sound 
they’re all getting, and that is the sound I 
want. That’s why I think I’m a tenor 
player. I’m a real sick motherfucker about 
that, man. I really do think I’m a tenor 
player. I’ve never been very much in love 
with the guitar. There are guitarists that I 
really like, and I like all kinds of guitar, 
but I don’t want to play like that. I hear 
something else. I hear tenor. I hear 
Albert. I hear Archie Shepp. I hear Bird. I 
hear Coltrane. There’s something else that 
they do. There’s another kind of sound in 
a saxophone. 

■ Would you agree that the guitar 
has suffered more than any other 
instrument because of technique? 

■ Yes, and that’s what you have to try to 
avoid. Because the saxophone is such a 



PHOTO: HIKE RUBIN 


human instrument in that you put your 
actual breath into it and it comes out, no 
matter how much technique you build up, 
the sound still comes out of your insides, 
even if you are Anthony Braxton. But 
with the guitar, being that it’s not 
coming from the inside, sometimes the 
humanity can get lost. Guitar players do 
tend to lean toward the technical side of 
the instrument. That’s one reason I don’t 
like it so much. Nowadays, with the help 
of the microchip, you can sound like 
anybody you want to sound like. Kids 
come in to the local music store looking 
for a particular sound: “Do you have the 
Pat Metheny box?” I mean, you can walk 
in and buy a box that’s programmed to 
sound like your favorite star. 

■ So how come there aren’t kids 
all over buying a ‘Sonny 
Sharrock box?’ 

■ I’m so happy about that, man, I think 
it’s because hopefully they won’t be able 
to get my shit into a box. If I keep 
fucking up like I am I’m sure they won’t! 
You know, I think there’s something 
wrong with that. I mean, technology is 
very nice, and I use it myself — I love 
my full stack Marshall amp, but I do go 
directly into it without any doodads. The 
sound is in you or it’s not there. I saw 
this A1 DiMeola concert on TV and he was 
onstage and he got this horrible look on 
his face, and then his tech came out and 
started twirling dials and shit to develop 
the right sound. Something’s wrong with 
that. It’s like fucking somebody and 
somebody has to come and replace some 
components of your dick. Like, “Whoa, 
that’s not right! She’s not feeling this! 
We have to put in another chip!,” just so 
you can fuck properly. It’s the same 
thing. Think if you were eating food, 
man, and the food just came as a blob, 
and in order to taste the thing you had to 
put in a disk, a floppy disk turkey dinner. 
A little tiny floppy disk went under your 
tongue and that would give you turkey 
dinner. Everything that they put on your 
plate would look like mashed potatoes. 
That’s what seems to be going on. 

■ Do you consider yourself a 
“jazz” guitarist? 

■ I consider myself a jazz saxophonist 
with a very fucked-up hom. 

■ But you don’t consider yourself 
a “rock saxophonist”? 





■ No, I never have been a rock player. 
I’ve been tagged with that, but I don't 
know anything about rock. 

Being the way I am I’ve had the 
opportunity to learn a lot from 
everybody. At the time I came up, there 
was a strict line drawn between “rock” and 
“jazz” people, and a lot of hate on both 
sides. The rock people thought I was “too 
jazz,” and the jazz people weren’t too 
happy about me either. I was a little loud 
for them, so they used to say “Sharrock- 
rock” and things like that. But I was 
listening to rock, in respect to the energy 
that the rock players were getting, and the 
sound, the very abrasive sound that they 
were getting, and that was attractive to 
me. So I started using those elements, a 
combination of the Coltrane and the Ayler 
and the way the guitar was being 
approached by the rock cats. 

■ But the sound of your guitar, 
from the way it’s so amplified 
and abrasive, has much more to 
do with what is thought of as 


“rock" playing than it does with 
“jazz." 

■ That part docs partially come from the 
rock end, you know, the volume levels, 
but like Miles said, Coltrane was the 
loudest horn player he ever heard in his 
life. Those guys played extremely loud, 
it’s just that we're used to a different kind 
of volume now because of the electronic 
thing. But for acoustic instruments, those 
saxophone players back in the '60s were 
playing so loud people couldn’t stand it. I 
saw Coltrane’s band drive people out of 
Birdland one night, ’cause they sat at the 
front table and that shit just drove them 
right out. You know, I go out onstage, 
and my intention is to make the first four 
rows bleed from their ears. 

■ Do you consider Last Exit to 
be strictly jazz as well? 

■ No, Last Exit is something entirely 
different. Last Exit is truly an 
amalgamation of things, because 
everybody comes from a different 
background in that band. Everybody’s got 


a different idea of how it should be, and 
everybody’s an equal partner. Peter 
Brotzmann comes from the tradition of 
the German avant-garde, not only in 
music but in painting, and I come out of 
the New York scene of the mid-to-late 
'60s, with Coltrane and Albert and those 
people being my gods, and Ronald 
Shannon Jackson comes out of Texas and 
the whole Fort Worth scene, you know, 
Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and all 
those cats, and Laswell is from Detroit. 
Last Exit is a strange band. There’s no 
way to put a finger on any one thing and 
say “this is Last Exit.” It could be 
anything at any moment. 

■ What do you think of the stuff 
you did with Herbie Mann now? 
I’ve never heard it, but a friend 
described him once as just this 
sort of lightweight, whitebread 
flute player. 

■ No, Herbie gets rapped for that, and I 
don't know if that’s quite fair. Herbie’s a 
good player, and he’s one of the best 



bandleaders in the business. Seriously. 
He’s a good eat. He’s got real big musical 
ears. He can hear a lot of things that a lot 
of people can’t hear. Like, he kept me in 
that band against the objections of all of 
the really big people and musicians who 
were telling him to get rid of me. I do 
believe that Herbie lost some gigs 
because I was in the band. 

■ So outside of New York, your 
guitar sound made you sort of an 
outcast? 

The first time 1 played London with 
Herbie, we did this festival. Sara Vaughn, 
Thelonius Monk’s band, and Herbie 
Mann. Some of that Monk movie. 
Straight No Chaser, is from that gig. And 
at that gig, people in the audience were 
shouting, “Get him off! No! No!” In 
Switzerland, the first time I played at the 
Montreux festival, a man stormed the 
stage and went banging on the stage, 
“This is not jazz! This is not jazz!” You 
gotta realize that there wasn’t even a rock 
press back then. There was no such thing 
as an alternative anything, there was just 
the mainstream of jazz. Coltrane was 
being lambasted all over jazz for doing 
what he was doing, and the younger cats 
like myself were catching hell too. And 
there I was, in the midst of pop-jazz with 
Herbie Mann, “Memphis Underground,” 
and I’m doing all this crazy shit. So that 
really took a lot of heart for Herbie to 
keep me on the band through that. 

■ Have you ever heard some of 
the guitarists who’re big at the 
Knitting Factory that seem to 
have been influenced by you, say, 
people like Bill Frisell and Arto 
Lindsay? 

■ What's to hear? What's to hear? 

■ Do you listen to much 
contemporary stuff, like by the 
other people you play at the 
Knitting Factory with? 

■ No. I don't listen to and never have 
really listened to my contemporaries. I 
never have. Even on those periods in the 
Lower East Side when we were all down 
there together learning, I never listened to 
anybody. I'm not very Catholic in my 
listening, I don’t listen to everyone, I 
don’t listen to younger cats, and I don’t 
listen to contemporaries. My mind is so 
full of what I’m hearing that I really don’t 
have time or space to listen to anybody 
else, except the masters, who can always 
teach me. When I’m listening to a cat 
who’s no better than I am, I’m not 
learning shit. If I’m listening to the 
masters, I'm always learning. 

I did this interview recently, and 
somebody asked me, “Did you see so-and- 
so, did you hear so-and-so?,” and I said 
“Look, man, he has nothing for me.” I 
saw Little Richard at the Apollo in the 
’50s. You don't get any more rock and 
roll than that. There is no way you can. 
That was the most astounding shit I have 
ever seen in my life. I saw Coltrane at 
Birdland. I saw Miles Davis at the 
Vanguard. I saw Duke Ellington. No put 


down of anybody else, but when you’ve 
seen masters, there’s very little that 
somebody else is going to show you. 

Actually, I listen to a lot of music, but 
it’s very selective listening. I listen to 
Coltrane every day. I listen to Charlie 
Parker every day. I listen to Miles every 
day. I listen to some '50s rhythm-and- 
blues every day. I only listen to what I 
like. That’s a trick I learned a long time 
ago: if you listen to what you like you'll 
be healthier. The brain is a very weird 
instrument. It never forgets anything that 
it hears, and it stores everything. You 
may not be able to recall it at will, but 
it’s there. So you should only listen to 
the shit that you like, because if you’re 
listening to a lot of bad shit it’ll come 
back on you in the middle of the night 
and you’ll be helpless and powerless to 
shut that shit off. 

I did some day gigs a few years ago and 
I was working with disturbed children in 
this school, and there was this one record 
by Carly Simon — I forget the name of 
the tune, one of her big hits, maybe 
“Anticipation” — and this girl used to 
love this song. To keep her calm, they 
used to play it; it was like an opiate for 
her. All day long they would play it. 
Sometimes now I’ll be walking along and 
I’ll catch myself whistling this song and 
say, “Aw shit!” Really, that’s how it 
goes. 

■ I’ve read in different places 
people getting hung up on the 
terms “free jazz” versus 
“improvisation.” Is there a 
difference in your mind? 

■ People make these differences in 
music. In American music, in all music 
that is made here in America, rock players 
improvise and jazz players improvise. 
There is a segment of players who call 
themselves “improvising musicians,” and 
to my eyes they're heavily influenced by 
the European avant-garde and that all 
equates to boring bullshit. These cats who 
sit around and try to give a lot of weight 
to not-very-good solos. None of it means 
shit if it ain’t good, whatever it is. If 
you’re a rock player and you’re playing 
something and the shit ain’t happening, 
it just ain’t happening, and there’s no 
way in the world you can make it sound 
like something. 

All of these different names for the 
music just make it easier for record stores 
to put your album in the back. It doesn’t 
really mean anything. If the music is 

good, then it's good. Americans 

improvise in their music. Americans open 
music up, whatever they’re doing, whether 
they're a pop singer or a jazz guitarist, 
they open the music up more than other 
people. American music is a unique thing. 

■ What about the term “fusion?" 

■ Somebody called me a “fusionaire,” and 
I’m not quite sure what they meant by 
that. What they usually mean by “fusion” 
is that you have a pretty hefty contract 
with CBS, and that you play some kind of 


electronic keyboard. For about five years 
you’re about as hot as you can get, and 
then you’re never heard from again. As 
music, I guess it would tend to mean 
really fast lines played by guitars and 
keyboards, with a lot of notes, a lot of 
sweet-picking arpeggios, and very little 
weight to the solos. Once you get past 
the heads, you listen to the solos, and 
that’s where music is really decided for 
me. If the solos don’t outweigh the heads 
of the tune, then not much has happened. 

■ Well, I wouldn’t call Last Exit 
“fusion,” but there’s definitely 
rock and jazz going on at the 
same time. 

■ Right, there’s a lot of things going on 
in there that have been brought together 
to make one sound. Sometimes it works, 
sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes Exit can 
be boring. Anybody can be boring, man. 

I did a solo concert up in Maine a couple 
of weeks ago. No band, just me. And there 
were points in there where I just looked at 
the audience and tried to figure out why 
they were still sitting there. The shit was 
boring me, you know, so I know it had to 
be boring them. And that happens 
anytime I play. I get bored with what I’m 
doing. If it’s not happening, I get bored, 
but with a band, I can stop playing and 
let someone else play. I guess the biggest 
sin that you can commit is to bore 
people. 

Last Exit is a band that was formed with 
the idea that we shall never talk about 
what we’re going to do, we shall never 
pre-plan anything, and that’s how it’s 
been. But when we did the Iron Path 
studio date, we were never all in the studio 
at the same time. Everybody came in and 
listened to what was happening and then 
played on top of it. 

■ What’s in the future for Last 
Exit? 

■ Last Exit will go on until World War 
III, at least. I’m sure of it. There’s no 
reason for Last Exit to break up: we only 
get together when it’s comfortable for us. 
There’s no responsibility. When I'm 
leading my own band, I have to think 
about a lot of different things, getting 
musicians to places and all of that, all 
those things that a bandleader has to 
think about, having the music presented 
right. With Last Exit, I walk on stage and 
I don’t give a shit about anybody else. I 
don’t have to think about anything, and 
we have a very good time. Then we all 
split and go our separate ways and we 
might not see each other again for a year. 
When the call comes, if everybody’s 
available, we do it and it’s fun. 

I don't even know the Last Exit songs 
by title, because we usually name the 
tunes in a bar when we’re pretty smashed, 
and then we decide without the benefit of 
hearing them what names we’ll just put on 
the record. We make a list and just put 
them on there. 

Exit is forever. I think we knew that 
when we founded it. ■ 





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HARRY CREWS 


pen-packin' old boy 


BY ROB MICHAELS 

Mr. Harry Crews is one of the grittiest, 
funniest, and most compassionate writers 
ever to emerge from the American South, 
and considering the competition, that's no 
mean feat. His roots extend deep into the 
mean and sweat-stained soil of the 
southern-Ceorgia dirt farm where he grew up 
in the wake of the Great Depression, a 
brutal season of "wonder years" stunningly 
chronicled in A Childhood: The 
Autobiography of a Place. After a brief stint 
in the U.S.M.C., a long string of wives, 
and a lengthy bout of hogback wanderlust, 
Crews hooked up with the University of 


Florida, where he currently teaches English. 
Along the way, he’s left a trail of some of 
the most side-splitting, tear-jerking, gut- 
wrenching pulp you'll ever read—mad and 
vital tales of Chevy-eating (Car), snake¬ 
sucking (A Feast Of Snakes), and 
bible/beaver-thumping (The Gospel 
S'mger)heelslheros staring down their fates 
and leaving their own crazy stains on an 
alien and unforgiving world. Mr. Crews has 
also lent his steady and penetrating hand to 
non-fiction, making numerous appearances 
in the likes of Playboy and Esquire. 

MOTORBOOTY spoke via telephone with 
this deadeye potentate of weatherbeaten 
wisdom and transcendental profanity. 


(Apparently, an ill-advised group of people 
has formed a tribute band bearing the name 
of the subject of this article. Said ensemble 
has neither any bearing on this interview, 
nor by the looks of things, on anything 
else.) 

■ MOTORBOOTY: So you’ve just 
published a new book? 

■ HARRY CREWS: Yeah. It’s called Body , 
and I could have gone to any number of 
places to get it published, but I ended up at 
Poseidon Press because they got me laid. 

■ Are your dealings with the 
publishing industry often a source 
of trouble? 







find out what you’re made of then you 
undertake to write a novel. In the popular 
mind, I think writers are thought as kind of 
panty-waisted, limp-wristed, semi-precious 
people. But it takes a brand of courage and a 
tolerance, a very high tolerance, for failure, 
frustration, and self-doubt, for running up 
into something that looks like it’s totally 
impossible, and instead of turning around 
and abandoning it, you sit to it and say no, 
goddamn it, there’s an answer in here 
somewhere, and I'm going to find it or 
fuckin’ die. It requires a tolerance for self¬ 
doubt and anxiety that most people have no 
notion of. Most anyone can deal with that 
sort of thing for a day or two, maybe even a 
week or two, but try dealing with it for a 
year or two. You get up every morning and 
it’s still there, right where you left it. I’ve 
never started a book in my life that I knew 
the ending of, I’ve never made an outline in 
my life. Robert Penn Warren said that a 
writer doesn’t have to know the story he 
starts out to write, all he has to do is 
believe in his knowledge of craft and 
technique to discover the story. Discovery 
is what it’s all about. If you already knew 
all the stuff you’re writing about, thcre’d be 
no reason to write about it. Writing is a 
form of thinking and a form of finding out 
at some kind of gut, blood level what you 
think about a thing. All of the best fiction 
is all about the same thing. It’s all about 
somebody doing the best he can with what 
he’s got to do it with—that’s all, that’s all 
it is. It’s all about good and evil and right 
and wrong. Writing is a terribly moral 
occupation practiced by not-necessarily- 
moral men and women. In fiction, 
somebody’s ass is on the line, he’s got to 
jump left or he’s gotta jump right, he can’t 


meet as just about anything that I can think 
of going to. Shit, I can remember when the 
seven-foot high jump was an insuperable 
barrier. I can remember when the four- 
minute mile was an insuperable barrier. Let 
me tell you something about that shit. 
Everybody knows that Roger Bannister was 
the first guy to ran a sub-four-minutc mile, 
but almost nobody knows how long his 
record stood. His goddamn record stood 
seventeen fuckin’ days, bud. All them years 
everybody said no one was going to run a 
sub-four-minute mile, but once one man 
showed that it was possible, a whole slew 
of guys came in and ran a sub-four-minute 
mile. 

I can tell you in just a heartbeat what my 
fascination with sports is. It’s this: I think 
all of us are looking for that which does not 
admit of bullshit You can’t get it in a 
marriage, you can’t get it in a—to use a 
word I hate—relationship, you can’t get it 
from the church or the government. The 
government for godsakes, don’t get me 
started on that. Every government in the 
world is just a tissue of lies, and anybody 
who doesn’t know that just hasn't thought 
about it very much. But if you tell me 
you’ve got 4.4 speed in the 40, hell, we’ll 
just put a watch on you and see if you’ve got 
it or not. If you tell me you can bench press 
450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you 
under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do 
it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports 
are just about as close to what one could call 
the truth as it is possible to get in this 
world. 

■ Do you think writing cuts 
through bullshit in a similar way 
as sports? 

■ Well I think that, but T also think there's 
a connection in another way. If you wanna 


■ I’m not sure there are any generalities 
that one could make about the publishing 
world that’ll hold up, except that most of 
the people involved are assholes. I’ve been 
treated pretty well, though. When you have 
a publisher, many times the only person 
you know there is the editor, and it’s not so 
much that there’s an adversarial situation 
between writers and editors, but the truth of 
the matter is this: a writer spends a year, 
year and a half or whatever it is writing a 
book and then some editor sits on the toilet 
for a weekend reading it and tells you what’s 
wrong with it. You leant quickly that they 
might be right and they might be wrong. I 
do think a good editor is a good thing to 
have, but a good editor is nothing more 
than a good reader, someone simply saying 
I do believe this, I don't believe that; this 
is too fast, this transition doesn’t work, 
etc. Editors, like agents, are a necessary 
evil. I never read a contract—I leave that up 
to my agent. I just make sure they promise 
me a lot of pussy whenever I come into 
town and sign on the dotted line. 

■ Have you written much non¬ 
fiction lately? 

■ Yes. A little while ago I found out that 
Scan Penn and Madonna are bibliophiles, 
both of ’em—not only do they buy and 
collect books, but they read 'em too. After 
they read The Knockout Artist they asked 
me to go to the Spinks-Tyson fight with 
them and I did, and later I wrote a piece on 
Madonna for a magazine. So yeah, I do 
some of it, but I started out to be a novelist 
and that’s where my heart is so I do less and 
less non-fiction. I’m currently writing a 
screenplay for Sean Penn. He wants to stop 
acting and direct, which should make 
everyone happy. We got along real well off 
the bat. He treated me like blood kin and I'd 
trust him with life. I don’t mind writing 
screenplays, but it’s Sears-Roebuck catalog 
prose. It doesn't matter how it's written, 
just so you know what the camera’s looking 
at. It turns me off—it reminds me of writing 
instructions on how to run a lawn mower. 

■ A lot of your books involve 

sports: football, boxing, 

karate.... 

■ Well my new book is informed by the 
world of female body building. I trained a 
girl that won a bunch of titles—she could 
have won the world if she'd have wanted to 
get heavier than 124 lbs, but she wouldn't. 
The girls that win the world now do it at 
weights like 155 and they look good so 
long as they’re in briefs and under posing 
lights and at a distance from ya, but put one 
of ’em in a dress and they don’t look 

so.well, it depends on the man. I admire 

them greatly but I’ve never been to bed with 
a 155 lb world-beating female body builder 
(or a male body builder for that matter) and I 
don’t know what it would be like, but it 
seems like huggin’ one of ’em would be like 
huggin’ a guy. But I don’t know, fuck it, I 
don't want to pass judgement on shit like 
that. You’re right, I follow a number of 
sports, boxing more closely than anything 
else. And strangely enough I love track and 
field. I’d just as soon go to a goddamn track 




happens between men and women that it’s a 
wonder anyone ever gets married. But by 
God, when it works, fuckin’ money or 
where you live and all that other shit don’t 
mean shit, man—you’ve got somebody. 
They ain’t your blood, but in one way 
they’re more than your blood. Despite the 
fact that I haven’t been married in eighteen 
years I still hold that shit in great awe. 

■ Your books also feature a lot of 
sideshow-attraction-type charac¬ 
ters. Aside from the non-fiction 
piece Carny, there’s obviously the 
very big-footed Foot in The 
Gospel Singer, Herman in Car, and 
even Eugene in The Knockout 
Artist. 

■ A lot of people like to call them freaks, 
which is a word I don’t use. Very often you 
see the “normal” world better, more clearly, 
and in a light which you would not 
otherwise see it if you are seeing it through 
the perception of "abnormal” human 
beings. You and I can hide all manner of 
shit. If the word crazy means anything it 
just means that you can’t do for yourself in 
the world, and that's when they lock you 
up. As long as you can put your clothes on 
and you can go to the grocery store and the 
laundry, it don’t matter much what you do, 
nobody’s going to fuck with you. But if 
you’re three feet tall, every goddamn face 
you meet is a mirror that gives yourself 
back to you. If you’re three feet tall and you 
go into a restaurant and you want a 
hamburger you’ve got to climb up on the 
stool to eat the goddamn thing. Well 
getting on a stool ain’t nothing to you and 
me but if you’re three feet tall it’s a 
motherfucker. I often see people that are 
special in the consideration of God, they’re 
all twisted and warped and in wheelchairs 
with motors and they’ve got two 
appendages on their one hand that they can 
sort of push buttons with. A great many 
things always occur to me. One, these 
people need to be hugged just as much as 
you or I do. They need to make that 
connection with another flesh. Also I want 
to look at ’em in such as to say “Hell, man, 
it ain’t nothing, you got fucked up, it was 
the hand that was dealt you and you’re 
dealing with it, fuck it, I’m with you.” On 
the other hand it’s difficult for me to look at 
them because the sympathy—or whatever 
you want to call what you feel about 
somebody getting hit with something like 
that—is bound to show on your fuckin’ 
face. I remember living with a woman who 
was a sculptor, and a damn good one, and 
she had a show of all these big things that 
she’d made. A fuckin’ blind boy came in and 
wanted me to tell him about what was there. 
Everybody else—hippy-dippy types 
standing around with long-stemmed glasses 
and shit—was treating him like it seems 
people always treat blind people. And then 
suddenly it occurred to me, I said wait a 
minute, fuck, man, give me your hand. And 
I started leading him around, putting his 
hands on the sculptures and telling him 
about what he was feeling. You could just 
see it all over him, he was grateful that 


the novel. There's this world-beating male 
body builder, and among other things he’s 
got the greatest back in the world, 
nobody’s ever had a back like that. He falls 
in love with this young girl who would be 
pretty if she was about 150 pounds lighter. 
She’s got good bone structure and all that 
but she’s just a very fat girl. It’s the first 
time they ever get down and get close. With 
her being as fat as she is, she hasn't had 
that many guys hit on her in her life, and all 
that shit’s alien to her. It's nice. It’s real 
sweet and it’s pretty. I don't write that 
many sweet and pretty, tender things. I 
don’t have anything against them, I’ve got 
something for them, but they rarely come 
to me. The odds are so overwhelming, 
statistically, against the thing that 


stay where he is. And in the jumping, he's 
got to make certain ethical and moral 
decisions, and live with ’em. 

As a rule, I always write about three hours 
a day, because the degree of concentration it 
takes to write and have it be any good is 
such that after three or four hours you feel 
like you’ve been beaten with a goddamn 
baseball bat. But that isn’t always true. 
Playboy recently bought a chapter from my 
new novel, and it was written in a way that 
almost nothing that I write is ever written. I 
wrote the whole chapter in one sitting. I 
wrote much longer than I usually do, but I 
was so in love with what I was doing and it 
was working even though I didn’t think 1 
could make it work because it’s a fuckin' 
love story, kind of a sub-story to the rest of 


Roger Bannister, looking for "that 
which does not admit 
of bullshit." 








somebody wasn’t treating him like a 
goddamn leper. 

■ Do you think there’s any 
connection between the 
performance aspect of a sideshow 
act and the act of writing—sort of 
exposing flaws, things that may 
cause shame? 

■ Well I never thought about it just that 
way but since you mention it, there 
probably is. One of the things I hate is 
when people get too precious about 
writing, make it too pristine, too elitist, 
too “you’ve got to have a certain kind of 
education or perception or elevated 
consciousness to understand it.” That’s 
horseshit. All of the great literature that I 
love, read, and re-read I find entertaining. 
Writing ought to entertain. But then I think 
if it only entertained it would be like 



television sitcoms. As Flannery O'Connor 
said along these same lines, the best 
comedy allows you to see the skull behind 
the smile. I mean, smiles are fine, but 
there’s a skull back there that of course 
reminds us of what we all know: we’re all 
going to lie down and die and the worms are 
going to get our fucking eyes and it’s not 
that one ought to be obsessed with that fact 
but you ought not to ignore it either. 

■ To what extent are your 
characters based on people you 
know? 

■ It’s definitely “based on.” I’ve always 
thought the imagination makes nothing out 
of whole cloth. I'm not prepared to make 
that a categorical statement, maybe it does, 
but if you’re writing about a building, 
you’re probably thinking about a building 
somewhere, even if it’s unconsciously. 
Then it all gets modified and transformed 
into something else. I know writers arc 
very fond of saying that they’re not in their 
own books. “Don’t look for me in my 
book. I’m not in here anywhere.” Well they 
probably are not in there in full form. But 
their prejudices, their sentiments, their 
biases, their angle of vision on the world— 
to say that’s not in the book is bullshit and 
they know it. It’s impossible for it to be 
otherwise. What they’re trying to say is 
"Don’t confuse me on some kind of one-to- 
one basis with somebody inside the book." 
This is particularly true if they’re writing a 
first-person novel. Readers are often 
inclined to confuse the voice, that “I,” with 
the person that’s writing it, but that’s a 


distinction that writers insist upon, and I 
think rightly so. I know I sure as hell do. 

My whole life isn’t writing. I might be 
shootin’ pool, or out in the woods, or 
hunting or fishing. Certainly fishing. But 
writing is central in my life. I may only 
work on it two or three hours a day but I do 
it seven days a week. If I get those hours, 
it’s kind of like an anchor to me in the 
world, and if you don’t like “anchor” then 
it's kind of like a stabilizing influence on 
me. Particularly if I think I’ve written 
something that’s not bad, that’s half-ass 
good. Then it doesn't much matter what 
happens to me the rest of the day, it can’t 
fuck with me. 

The truth of the matter is that we’ve all 
got strong suits and weak suits and there’s 
no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. 
There’s going to be flaws in everything but 
some people are so goddamn strong in the 
things they do well that the flaws can be 
overlooked. Faulkner comes to mind. Shit, 
Faulkner could write some of the worst 
motherfuckin’ metaphors that have ever 
been imagined in the history of letters, and 
when he just gets purple, when his prose 
gets out of hand, he’s capable of turning a 
passage into rank, sophomoric bullshit. 
But he’s so goddamn strong in so many 
other ways that it just doesn't matter. 
Obviously, Faulkner has been an influence 
on the whole world and I don't dare go near 
one of his books when I’m writing 
something. His voice is so goddamn 
overwhelming that I just don’t. 

■ You’ve got to be at least sixty 


now. What do you have to say 
about that? 

■ Well, there ain’t a hell of a lot to be said 
for getting old. But I’m not as hard on 
myself. I’ve always run on a tight wire. I’ve 
got a nervous temperament and if I want to 
do something, I want to do it at least 100%, 
full bore, like if I can't have too much of 
something I don’t want anything at all. But 
in recent years, that's gone away, or been 
modified. I rather like myself more than I 
did earlier. I’ve got a little more patience 
with myself and with my failings and flaws 
and the things that I can’t do. And a little 
more patience with other people. There’s 
no goddamn reason to totally go nuts 
because some poor sonofabitch is doing the 
best he can and his best just ain’t worth a 
shit. There’s no reason to beat on the 
motherfucker or get upset about it, but I 
used to do a lot of that. I backed off that 
pretty good and I’m glad about it. 

■ Those other people are probably 
pretty glad about it too. 

■ Oh yeah. 

■ Do you think that your change 
in temperament has shown in your 
writing, or maybe it’s because of 
your writing? 

■ I don’t know if it’s shown in my 
writing, and it's not that I’ve made peace 
with my writing, with what I’m capable of 
doing. It’s not as though I’ve said to 
myself, “Well, you're a pretty mediocre 
motherfucker,” which I don't believe. 
Modesty’s not my strong suit. I'm not a 
modest man. It's not that. It’s just that for 
many years I would literally tear my guts 
out doing the very, very best that 1 could 
and then, on top of that, beat on myself 
because it wasn’t better. Well fuck that, 
man. If you’ve already opened everything 
that you could get open, if you’ve given 
every fuckin’ thing you've got, well then, if 
you’re going to do anything, you ought to 
say to yourself, "Well, old son, it ain’t 
Shakespeare and it ain't Dostoevsky but 
what the fuck, it ain’t too bad for an old boy 
out of south Georgia." Have a little 
forgiveness for yourself. I've always been 
hard on other people, but harder on myself 
than I was on them. Nothing was ever good 
enough and nothing ever is good enough. 
I’ve never finished any fuckin’ book, 
including the one that I just finished, where 
I didn’t say, “Well, son, you blew it again." 
That's what led Graham Greene to say that 
the artist is doomed to live in an 
atmosphere of perpetual failure. 
Conception is pristine and pure and has all 
manner of hope in it, but between 
conception and execution, something gets 
lost. I’m sorry bud but don’t let anybody 
shit you, there’s a big gap there. There’s 
always going to be a big gap there and you 
can drink yourself to death over it or you 
can shoot yourself in the head over it or you 
can be an asshole to your family about it. 
There’s a lot of ways you can handle it, and 
everybody, every man and woman, comes 
to their peace with that however they do. I 
got no advice here, everybody works it out 
for him or herself. ■ 



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at seven!” 



PHOTOS BY PHIL DORR 


What Gone In Sixty Seconds fan 
doesn't long to hear those words! A 
real date with Eric Oblander, that 
troublesome tow-headed troubadour 
from GISS, would be sheer heaven, 
and it might go just like this: 

6:53 P.M. 

Your doorbell rings—Eric must be a little 
early! You peek downstairs, but it’s just 
“Ronnie Retardo,” the special ed. boy who 
scared you when you were little. Your father 
tells him there’s going to be a thunderstorm 
so he’ll run away. 

7:15 P.M. 

Still no Eric! While you’re waiting, you 
put your lawn-blue colored copy of GISS's 
So Far From Good, So Close To God 
(recorded in the nude) on the turntable, and in 
no time that kick-pants beat (courtesy of ex- 
Scduce drummer Chuck Bums) has you 
shimmying around your room, lost in the 
sound of “rock music.” Your friends often 
play “air guitar” along with Special K's Hair 
Bear Bunch-inspired leads, but you always lip- 
sync Eric's lyrics. Eric has the most perfect 
voice you’ve ever heard—so perfect that your 
mother sometimes sings and dances along! 
Her favorite is the Motorhcad-colored “Nitro 
Burning Funny Girl,” while you prefer the 
Aerosmithsonian riffage of “Kick In The 
Head.” 

11:10 P.M. 

Just when you’re about to give up, the 
phone rings. It’s him! He’s calling from a pay 
phone and slurring his words just like your 
father did on New Year’s Eve. Eric is in the 
mood to celebrate because he just lost his job! 
He tells you that those stupid off-thc-farm 
police took away his driver's license, just 
because he sideswiped a few Christmas 
shoppers in the parking lot at Southwyck 
Mali, and asks you to borrow your parents' 
Cutlass Siena. Even though you don’t start 
driver's training 'til next semester, his voice 
is so confident and reassuring that you know 
it’ll be a breeze to start driving tonight! 
Following Eric’s advice, you quietly open the 
garage door and push the car out of the 
driveway and down the block before you start 
it, so as not to disturb your parents’ slumber. 

12:00 Midnight 

It's tough getting used to those power 


brakes and you stall a bunch of times, but in 
no time you arrive at the 7-11 that Eric 
phoned you from. A perfect gentleman, he 
offers to take the wheel and asks you to hold 
on to his beer (!) while he lights a cigarette 
with one hand, turns up a tape of KISS’s 
Destroyer with the other and steers with his 
knee. Eric sure is a great driver—and fun too! 



Your father never drives over soccer fields or 
meticulously-tended Japanese shrubs! Eric 
already has the night's entertainment all 
planned, too. “I’m up for sliders," he says, 
“How much money you got?” 

12:15 A.M. 

Denny's is open all night and also happens 
to be Eric's fave munching spot so you decide 
to stop there to eat. Eric orders a “Brawny 
Lad,” a “Lanky Franky," a heaping bowl of 
Maumee gumbo, an assortment of meat pies 
and half of the breakfast menu, while you 
order a Diet Coke and fries. What an appetite! 
He finishes his meal before you even touch 
your fries! “You gonna finish those?" he says 
with a shy smile. “I hate ihe french but I love 
their fries!” As he licks your plate clean he 
makes you giggle by pointing at different 
people in the restaurant, pretending he knows 
their names, and making up little stories 
about them. “There’s Photo Man Jr.” he 
laughs, pointing to a black-garbed, rodent-like 


individual who’s squirming in his seat like he 
has to go to the bathroom. “Nobody likes that 
guy. He's got a tattoo of Tattoo from Fantasy 
Island, hair extensions for his sideburns, and 
he went to drug re-hab for pot! He borrowed 
somebody’s van for a beer run and ended up 
living in it!” You can see why Eric is such a 
good lyricist—his wit is so spontaneous! On 
your way out, you’re doubled over with 
laughter as Eric nonchalantly tosses the bill 
to the next table and flicks his lit cigarette at 
the head of a mohican'd dolt seated nearby. 
“Christ!” Eric mutters, “What fucking year 
does that guy think it is, anyway?” 

1:20 A.M. 

“I'm all pumped up like a little Zeppelin,” 
Eric announces as he discreetly cuts one and 
peels out of the parking lot. It’s past your 
bedtime, but the evening’s fun is just 
beginning because the car-lined street ahead 
can only mean one-thing. “Party!” Eric shouts 
over a tape of “AC/DC” by Sweet, “We’re in 
the house!” When you arrive at the party you 
find that it’s filled with stuck-up people from 
your school. Everyone recognizes Eric and 
gets out of his way, and the girls are all 
glaring enviously at you! Special K., Steve 
“House Me” Smith (the bass player) and 
rhythm guitarist Andy (who used to play with 
thenot-nice Necros) are already there—they’ve 
picked up someone’s Honda Civic and left it 
lying in the street, and now they're egging the 
inside of the house and prank-calling Perth, 
Australia. “Get any face?" Steve asks, leering 
good-naturedly at you as he elbows Eric in the 
ribs. You blush and Eric does a spit-take, 
inadvertently spraying beer all over the few 
remaining partiers. “I wish they’d just move 
away!” whines a drenched sissy on his way 
out. 

1:35 A.M. 

Your weeping father enters the party. 
“Where is my little girl?” he sobs, furious but 
helpless in the face of the collective girth of 
GISS. Everyone is laughing at him and you 
are so embarrassed that you could just die! But 
Eric is a true gentleman. “There, there, little 
man" he says, gently putting his arm around 
your quivering father. “Your daughter really 
has some Waylon Jennings, but she's still 
got her shirt on, so what's with the drama?” 
As your father whisks you out the door you 
turn just in time to see Eric wink and mouth 
those magic words: I’ll call you . 





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TAKE A SHOWER WITH 



WRITTEN BY ROB MICHAELS 
INTERVIEW BY MIKE DANNER 


Save for the occasional shot in the arm 
from Willie Tyler and Lester (or maybe the 
Manson chicks gone Kojak), that inscrutable 
quasi-theatrical mishmash called performance 
art has been in the sorriest of inspirational 
slumps ever since that Buddhist monk lit up 
the streets of Saigon some 25 years ago. 
What could've become an unfettered fomm for 
catastrophic feats of mind/body fusion has 
instead grown into the perhaps the nastiest 
bastion of “Sprockets”-istic carrot-waxing in 
all God's creation. On one hand, it's the 
"artists,” nothing but a bunch of stilted old 
mimes in clever new bottles and oversized 
suits, touching each other's monkeys and 
spouting gibberific po-mo profundities as if 
the world needed a vaudeville Baudrillard any 
more than grandpa needs a boil on his ass. On 
the other hand, it’s the “sickos,” finger- 
flipping bozos of the “Look ma. I'm naked 
AND I’m bleeding” school, pimp-walking 
along an “edge” that really hasn’t moved for 


about 20 years and lobbying for a plug in 
Re!Search harder than the guys in Dr. Hook 
wanted to make the cover of the Rolling 
Stone. (Word up, Karen Finley: it’s not like 
showgirls in Bangkok and Tijuana haven’t 
been stuffin’ their clams fulla produce for the 
last 100 years in exchange for little more than 
a few plug nickels and an occasional kick in 
the teeth.) 

But buck up, beefy eyes, cause someone 
has finally ridden in to save the day. No, 
Flavor Flav hasn’t announced a clothes- 
optional solo tour (just keep praying for that 
one). We’re talking about Jeffrey, the Teena 
Marie of performance art: one part limburger. 
two parts balls, and three parts unbridled 
emotional mariah. A dancer/ singer/ 
composer/ musician/ lip-sync artist who 
outshines any in the Monongahela River 
valley, or for that matter, the rest of the 
world. 

Unlike his above-maligned competitors, 
Jeff isn’t out to prove how smart, hip or 
tough he is—he’s only out to express himself 
and to share that expression with his ever- 
widening audience. There’s no need for self- 


aggrandizing nods to boneheaded froggie 
theorists or big-housed, short-eyed scum (as if 
J.W. Gacy’s roadside clown pics oughta save 
him from the king-sized lethal hypo he so 
richly deserves)—Jeff s own experience as a 
very single white male janitor in Indiana, PA 
provides a rich and ample frame of reference 
for his work. And unlike those who brandish 
their sexuality as a badge of rebellion, 
reducing their most sacred booty-centric 
desires to the stuff of a grisly sideshow (like 
the world needs a death-tripping Ron Jeremy 
any more than grandma needs to relive 
menopause), Jeffry exudes a Venusian, let- 
your-hair-hang-down eroticism that is as 
playful and natural as the artist himself. 

So in a Povich-like quest to get the inside 
scoop on the growing Jeffrey phenomenon 
(the list of recent Jeffrey converts includes 
Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, 
and the guy who can stop a rotary fan with 
his tongue ) MOTORBOOTY spent over two 
hours on the hom with the man himself, 
doing all we could to immerse ourselves, 
Gangcs-stylc, in the purifying geyser of 
Jeffdom. 

I GOTTA BE ME 

I enjoy my music very much and I write it 
and play it at home because I enjoy it. It 
comes from very deep within but I don’t want 
it to just stop at my living room; that’s why 
I make tapes. The music I make reflects the 
theology and values of Jeffrey. I would just 
call it Jeffrey music. It doesn't have any 
specific style. It has elements of jazz, movie 
theme music, and ballads, but the vocals are 
strictly Jeffrey—very unusual, very avant- 
garde. Every few months I publish Jeffer, 
which is the Journal of Jeffrey Music. It lets 
people know what’s tops on the Jeffrey “Top 
40,” and keeps them up on new 
developments, such as when I added rap songs 
like “Jeff Be Rappin” to my repetoire. I sell 
my tapes through mail order (Bring On The 
Jeffer and Hey, It's Jeff are big favorites) and 
I also sell off the little towels that I use to 
wipe my sweat off after shows. 

SHINGA, BABY, SHINGA 

Some of my main dancing influences were 
different strippers and go-go girls. When I was 
going to printing school in Philadelphia some 
of the guys would ask me to go to the bar. I 
was under 21 at the time and they'd have to 
sneak me in to see the go-go dancers. They 
weren’t nude but occasionally they’d slip a 
peek of their breasts as they danced to the 
popular music of the day, which was like 
1973. I’d also go to the Trap Door burlesque 
theater when I was old enough to get in. I 
went three times to see the strippers and that 
influenced me, because even though their 
moves were kind of pretentious and a little 
overdone they had a certain comedy to them, 
even though they weren’t trying to be 
comical. I like to mimic things like that and 
exaggerate them. I liked their moves and their 
energy and that’s what inspired my dancing, 
not the sexual part so much. 

When pressed, I guess I would agree that 
there is some sexual aspect to my dancing, 



but that’s because I feel freer around a coffee 
house-type of crowd and I can just be me. It’s 
still mimicry but I feel sex is a part of life 
too, and given the rhythms of the music it's 
pretty hard not to bump and grind, you know. 
But I still wouldn't say that its a sexual turn¬ 
on when I dance, just an emotional one. 

I'd say my favorite dancer would have to be 
the fella who danced in that movie Fame. I 
think his name is Leroy and that’s where I got 
the idea of slapping my rear end, because he 
did something similar in the movie. 

"I THREW GUMBY OUT THE WINDOW!" 

When I was eight years old I listened to a 
Top 40 station in Philly and when I would 
come home from school I would turn on my 
radio and listen to it. I enjoyed stuff like the 
Orlons, very good music then. Nothing like 
Top 40 today, which isn’t very real or 
believable music. As a teenager, I was mostly 
into soul music and funk, people like Barb 
Mason, Doris Duke, and a group called the 
Politicians who were a psychedelic funk 
group sort of like Funkadelic. I dislike a lot 
of the Top 40 music that they’re playing 
today. I think it's terrible. 1 dislike Tone-Loc. 
I liked Madonna's older stuff from '83 but 
now I think she’s sounding very bland and 
commercial, and I don’t like her dancing. It's 
too suggestive. I think that Paula Abdul’s 
stuff is very weak and watered-down and 
doesn't have any spirit or funk to it. It’s all 
drum machines and doesn't sound real. I mean 
drum machines are alright but there's a time 
to start using real drums again. I don't care for 
her dancing. I think it's openly suggestive in 
an exploitative way. I think it would be okay 
if she was just having fun or being comical 
but otherwise it just doesn't seem to be in 
good taste. I’m upset that a lot of newer soul 
music has sold out and that Aretha Franklin 
and Tina Turner have watered down their 
music into pop. I mean, it's a bit early for 
Anita Baker imitations, don't you think? 

MAKING THE SCENE 

I began by doing telethons in Indiana. I 
volunteered for a Big Brothers/Big Sisters 
telethon in 1979. At the time, all I did was 
dance, no singing, and I danced to a Latin 
song and “Respect” by Aretha. I wasn’t 
prepared for the fanfare that followed. That 
night, the phones lit up and the viewers 
wanted me back on. I wasn't aware that I was 
gifted that way. Then, some time later, I 
think it was December 1987,1 did a telethon 
from Indiana Mall. That set drew a lot of 
attention even though I still didn't sing; I was 
too scared to go forward that way at a 
shopping mall so I just did strictly dancing. 
But in the December 1988 telethon at 
Regency Mall I sang the song “Red Motor 
Bike" to a tape of an instrumental tune. It 
went very well. People in the Montgomery 
Wards remember seeing me on the televisions 
there. There were also lip-sync contests at the 
malls. The last one I entered was in 
September 1989. I picked a song called 
“Swami” off of a compact disc called Pebbles, 
a compilation of obscure, psychedelic '60s 
garage bands. They told me that I should 


stick with something more acceptable or the 
people might not even clap for me, but then I 
decided to go with what was in my heart, 
what was right for me. 

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN 
EXPERIENCED? 

I tried marijuana a long time ago out of 
curiosity in the late '70s. I never inhaled it 
properly, the certain way you’re supposed to 
hold it in, although I must have got a little in 
because I felt kind of giddy, a little high. But 
I don’t think I did it right. Growing up as a 
teenager all I ever heard about was how great 
it was, what a great high it was, but at the 
time I didn’t want to bother with it. I didn’t 
think drugs were right. 



Jeffrey tries 


I have never taken LSD but I have done 
Allarest. It’s an over-the-counter 
antihistamine that turns you inio a vegetable. 
I never did it extensively, only when I had 
nasal congestion. Except for once. I was 
unemployed at the time and I figured a nice 
buzz would be good for the afternoon. I still 
use it when I have congestion and it does give 
me relief. Now they make a “no-drowsiness” 
formula but if I’m going to pay for medicine I 
might as well get a side effect to go along 
with it. 

CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH 

When I was younger I was very much 
turned off by religion. I had to go to Sunday 
School and I dreaded it. The kids were very 
cruel and they picked on me. I think it was 
just because I was different and they were very 
mainstream kids. I had a unique personality, I 
stood out. I didn’t like baseball and the other 
things that kids were expected to like. At the 
time, I liked Archie comic books, going to 
animal movies, collecting bottle caps, and 
making Sony reel-to-reel tape recordings of 
my relatives when I visited Indiana. Although 
it was mostly recordings of talking, some of 
my relatives would sing. They’d sing some 
old songs, especially my aunts. Actually, my 
aunts were very into entertaining me. Maybe 
that’s where I got this talent from—maybe 
it’s in my blood, inherited. 


BUST A PRAYER 

One time a friend of mine convinced me to 
accompany him to a prayer meeting at the 
Pentecostal Church. I thought it would be the 
same as the Catholic prayer meetings with 
people sitting around in a circle with someone 
playing the guitar, but one Friday night I 
walked in and I heard a saxophone going with 
drums and a banjo, and it was totally 
unexpected. I was overwhelmed. I thought I’d 
just hear folk music but it sounded more like 
a nightclub band. So I started going to the 
services at the Pentecostal Church and I was 
getting closer to God, mostly by moving my 
body and getting down with the music. But I 
still didn't accept Jesus as my personal savior 
because I was raised Jewish and I figured if He 
was really the Messiah, then why didn’t the 
Jews believe in him? I couldn’t believe in 
something that wasn’t really true, I had to be 
sure. But I kept getting closer to God and 
knew that God was real and that He could give 
me answers. Then, around April, 1976, a 
pragmatic move led me to accept Christ as 
my savior: instead of waiting for an 
unknown Messiah to come along, I thought 
why not enjoy the one that was already here? 
It was really just pragmatism. I asked Jesus to 
forgive me for every sin I could think of. I 
didn't have the correct teaching, all I had to do 
was just place my trust in him. It wasn’t 
hard. 

What were those sins? Well, when I was a 
little boy and went to summer camp me and 
the kids in the carpool used to pick on this 
other boy. There was also one girl we all used 
to pick on. I think it was because we asked 
them to sing a song and they wouldn’t or they 
did it reluctantly, so I said “Let's pick on 
them, they wouldn’t sing when we asked 
them to.” So yes, I initiated it and I’m very 
ashamed of that. It’s one of the worst sins 
I've committed. It wasn't right for me to pick 
on him. I guess I felt they were being kind of 
stand-offish by not wanting to sing. Maybe 
that’s why I was picked on so bad later—you 
reap what you sow. 

IT’S A NEW WORLD OF 
REFRESHMENT 

The reason I’ve written so many songs 
about showers f "Take A Shower With Jeff," 
"Showerhead," "Soul Shower," “Won't You 
Come Into The Shower With Me," "I Found 
A Girl In My Shower Stall," "Don't You 
Want To Shower With Jeff." "Won't You 
Come Into The Shower With Me," and 
"Gumby's In The Shower Stall," to name but 
a few — ed) is that I had a shower installed in 
my living room, and that’s what I see 
whenever I sit down at my keyboards to make 
Jeffrey music. These songs use that very 
sensual, cleansing shower imagery to lure 
people in, because they think they’re going to 
be songs about sex. But I don’t go any 
further. I only sing about hugs and kisses. 
Someday I’d like to make a shower video, 
featuring simply me and my shower. ■ 

JEFFERY 
PO BOX 301 
INDIANA, PA 15701 




AN OVERVIEW BY MIKE RUBIN AND ROB MICHAELS 


HIGH LIGHTS AND HIGH JINKS: 
A DETROIT ROCK CHRONOLOGY 


■ 1949: Transplanted Detroiter John 
Lee Hooker records “Motor City Is 
Burning,” a prime piece of pre-NWA 
strcct-bcat reportage re: the 1943 Detroit 
riot. 

■ 1955: In the September of his career. 
Detroit-born Bill Halley finally scores a 
hit with “Rock Around The Clock,” 



December 1981. The Rolling Stones 
Interminable American Tour hits the 
Pontiac Silverdotne, Pontiac, Michigan. 
After opening act Iggy Pop, ne Iggy 
Stooge from nearby Ypsilanti, MI, is 
savagely booed off stage after only two- 
and-a-half songs. Master of 
Ceremonies!Head of Clean-Up Committee 
Bobo Brazil takes the microphone and 
begins reading off a list of items thrown 
onstage during Mr. Pop's abbreviated and 
fishnet-stockinged performance: 24 empty 
bottles of Boone's Farm Apple Wine, 36 
unbreakable pocket combs, 62 pairs of men 
and women's underpants, 4 pairs of Sans-a- 
belt® slacks, 3 tire irons. 21 aluminum 
folding chairs, 34 automobile hubcaps (26 
from General Motors cars), assorted coins 
amounting to $73.18, various fragments of 
an estimated 250 hot dogs, 1 rainbow afro 
wig, 1 bowling ball, 2 dummy grenades, 
186 bottles of Faygo Red Pop... 

More than any other- image, the 
Iggy Pop being ejected from 
his hometown audience 
show sums up the schizc 
Michigan music in a nu 
showering the figure most 
(along with Berry Gordy, of course)- 
putting the area on the regional rock and 
roll map with garbage instead of accolades 
might seem more than a tad bit 
preposterous, but such an action is only in 
keeping with the bizarre set of paradoxes 
and hypocrisies that comprise and define 
that sociocultural entity called Detroit. 
Why not bombard the foremost progenitor 
of the post-Motown, post-apocalyptic hard 
rock sound with assorted household trash 
and suburban refuse? Certainly it makes as 
much sense as the local entertainment 
media spending scads of time, dirt, and 
money crowing about its storied musical 
heritage yet remaining steadfastly amnesiac 
about the actual identity of those ancestors, 
or the aging, expanding, local late '60s 
warriors revelling in the supposed “glory” 
of the amplified accomplishments of their 



st-ever 
state of 
e idea of 


youth, despite the anonymity and margi- 
nality of their existence, then and now. 
Why not peg the Ig in the noggin with a 
handful of pocket change; who the hell is 
he anyway? After all the hoopla and 
hyperbole, all the adjectives and ad 
campaigns, all the malapropian com¬ 
parisons and malicious reappropriations, 
the burning question at hand still remains: 
exactly what is “Detroit rock and roll?,” and 
to the point, does it still or did it ever 



To begin an examination of the secret 
history of Detroit rock and roll one must 
first look briefly at the city itself, since the 
music produced in the Motor City from the 
end of the '60s to the early '70s is, more 
than the music of almost any other area, 
tied intrinsically to the collective ethos of 
its host. Stubborn, tough, butt-ugly and 
sometimes violent, the nation’s sixth 
largest city has from the mid-60s onward 
black while the 
are overwhelmingly 
j* i powdered-doughnut- 
and-hole that, while not entirely correct, is 
a not-far-fetched metaphor for the Detroit 
shakedown/Motor City breakdown of the 
area’s economic investment. Via the 
tentacular expressways the wealthy and 
upper-middle class took their homes and 
businesses and fled, leaving behind 
bissected working class neighborhoods and 
the shell of the once-thriving auto industry. 
Despite some progressive exceptions, no 
one would confuse Detroit for a 
cosmopolitan bohemia; simply put, it’s a 
factory town, geared (pardon the pun) 
around (and primarily responsible for) the 
American obsession with the car, loyal to 
the union, decidedly Midwestern in its 
point of view, and for the most part, 
satisfied with the little cultural expression 
provided. It isn't heaven on Earth, but at 
the same time, it ain't hell. 

The image of Detroit that reaches the 
living rooms and T.V. eyes across America, 
however, is not that of a wounded 


■ 1964: Young Bob Seger lands a job at 
the Ford Motor Plant in Ypsilanti, MI. 
One long week later, Seger drops a 
Thundcrbird carburetor assembly smack 
on his foot and never returns to the plant 
again. Upon losing a protracted 
workman’s comp suit, Seger decides to 
make the best of his brief experience by 
mythologizing it in countless 
overwrought odes to "life on the line." 

■ 8/65: A promising career is cut short 
when Steve Pawlukiewicz of Ann Arbor’s 
original garage greats the Cogs is killed 
on a booby-trapped toilet in Vietnam. 
Four years later a thinly-veiled version of 
their show-stopping theme song “I’m 
Gonna Be Your Cog,” resurfaces in the 
repertoire of a better-remembered local 
group. 

■ 10/65: The Rationals' “Gave My 
Love’’/“Feelin’ Lost” is released on Jeep 
Holland’s A-Square label. Although he’s 
a nice guy, uncoordinated Rationals 
drummer “Moose” Meese is unable to 
play more than one drum in his kit at a 
time, so Iguanas percussionist Jim 
Ostcrbcrg is drafted to handle bass drum 
duties, his first-ever recorded appearance. 

■ 7/67: Trapped on the Wayne State 
campus as riots rage through the city, 






paper revolutionary John Sinclair fears 
that his dream to become the first hippie 
president may end in with his premature 
death. Slapping on a dollop of shoe 
polish to fashion a crude Aretha Franklin 
disguise, the minstrali/cd Sinclair flees 
on foot to Ann Arbor. 

■ 10/67: While ersatz bluesmen Cream 
plod through a show at the Grande 
Ballroom, guitarist Fred Smith of more- 
popular opening act the MC5 gives 
Cream bassist Jack Bruce a less-than- 
favorable mid-set critique, so incensing 
the sanctimonious Englishman that he 
stops playing immediately and gives up 
sex altogether. 

■ 5/68: Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, eco- 
pimp Charles “Chazz” Manson (a.k.a. 
Jesus Christ, a.k.a. the God of Fuck, 
a.k.a. Buddha Sattva) and a few of his 
prizest hubba-hubba concubinettes 
(which at the time included Heart-throb 
“Dreamboat Annie” Wilson) roll through 
Motortown promoting the Beach Boys’ 
cover of Chuck's “Cease to Resist” 
(formerly “Cease to Exist”). After 
washing down some hash croissants with 
a few glasses of Mr. Naturalized Hawaiian 
punch, the easy-going crew joins the 
MC5 onstage at the Edgewater Park band 
shell for a spirited rendition of I Wanna 
Be Your Dog,” initialing the unfortunate 
trend of celebrity jamming on said tune. 
Back at the White Panther house, the 



From Solution to problem: 
Tyner, 1990 


The IfCS't Bob Tyner, owner of the 
matt prosperous caucasoid afro 
since Bernie o f "Room 222," on the 
subject of tteo im meat money: 

We weren’t hippie*—no fuckin' way! 

- Hippies didn't work for a living and we were 
a working rode and roll band. We worked 
our asses oft! We had constant problems 
with everybody—the police, the 
competition, the press— and the politics of 
the situation eventually got so crazy that i 
we couldn't even get to & music anymore. 
Something horrible was always happening, 
like one time in Benton Harbor they passed 
an ordinance dun basically said that long¬ 
haired rock and roll bands front Detroit 
couldn't make lewd and lascivious below- 
the-equator movements onstage and get the 
girls going nuts, so we weren’t allowed to 
move onstage. We had to sit in folding 
chairs like idiots, doing songs like “I Wan: 
Yea Right Now,” It was pretty ridiculous, 
but there was nothing we could do! Finally I 
got so frustrated that 1 just took my chair 
and smashed it, and then we went ahead and 
finished the show. They didn't arrest us that 
time, anyway. A lot of times promoters 
would try to take advantage of os, they'd 
write a clause into the contract stating that 
if we said any dirty words at all onstage 
they wouldn’t have to pay as. A couple of 
times we’d play these shows in the middle 
of the state where they knew that in order to 
come off as being real to the crowd we 
would have to say ‘'Motherfucker,” but then 
they wouldn’t have to pay us! Then we 
started finding ways to get around it, We'd 
play » Catholic high school and say “KM 
out the jams. Mother Superior!" 

, There was a big split between us and the 
revolution people and Sinclair, 'cause 
Sinclair's politics were just out to ljnch. He 
had so many self-inflicted problems with 
the law, and it just got so expensive and so 
crazy that we either had to dump him or go 
under. The revolution people always said 
that we were supposed to he living a 
communal/socialist/communist thing, but 
we never believed in that because we had us 
do the work. We were the people out there 
getting our heads busted onstage, and it 
wasn't really a political thing for us. It was 
rtWreof a job. Then we had to talk about all 
this bullshit rhetoric communist politics 
and we’ve seen what's happened to 
communism. It just doesn't work, lets face 
it It ain’t ever gonna work. 


There was always this thing about 
romantic adventurism. The brave fighter for 
truth and justice against the evil machine 
and all that shit, standing up and waving 
Mao's red book, spouting all this fucking 
rhetoric, taking on the stance of this great 
big hero, when actually the guy’s a college 
student. When the shit came down the 
regular people would get their asses beat 
this guy would turn around and say, "This is 
good because the people are being educated 
to the political situation.” That’s insane! 
We played at the Belle Isle Love-In riot and 
the *68 riots in Chicago and I saw what 
happens when you get into it with the cops. 
People weren't being educated, they were 
getting their heads beat ml I couldn’t see 
ihe sense to it And when the cops started 
beating people, the romantic adventurers 
somehow weren't there anymore. I think 
that, politically speaking, all of that 
revolutionary jazz horn the old days was 
mostly bullshit. Sinclair was running the 
publicity machine at that time and he was 
trying to look macho to all the others in 
the underground movement. I’m not trying 
to discredit the ideals of it, the ideals of it 
are one thing but the reality of it is another. 
Okay, so we lived in a commune where 
everything was supposed to be equally 
shared by everybody. The band was out on 
the road kicking ass' to make money to 
support die lifestyle of these hippies. Then 
you’d come home, and some bare-breasted 
broad would walk in with the red book 
spouting Mao’s rhetoric, telling you how 
you should not be to materialistic, and give 
up the money. Well that didn’t last too 
tong, to tell you the Oath. We did the work 
and didn't see the benefits from it. Our 
raSttfy was aria-managed and mis-spent and 
the management philosophy was just 
moOnd the bend. 

Mr. Michael Davis, bassist in the 
band thst fad a far vent campaign 
against underwear amt pioneered that 
inter~gen day salute, the "tltshake ," 
on the subfact of "revolution": 

We were the White Panthers! We admired 
the Black Panthers for their stance. Like 
Orem we set up a ten-point program, but it 
was conceived with a sense of humor. They 
were out there marching in platoons, they 
were practicing for something. We were 
sitting around the dining room table 
getting really high, and just cracking up. It 












Rob Tyner: " Listen, when It comes to carousing, the MCS's entire career doesn't 
amount to one week-end tor Motley Crue." 


PHOTO: EMIL BACILLA 


was kind of like a brotherhood, there was a 
serious underlying thing, but since it was 
conceived with a sense of humor I always 
thought it worked. As long as you were 
laughing, and everyone was having a good 
time, everything you were saying was true. 
Kids just ate it up and it seemed like there 
was nothing that could stop it. St wasn't 
until the whole thing became 
confrontational that it lost its power. 

There was always a big sex scene with us. 
The White Panthers were the party of dope, 
rock and roll, and fucking in the streets— 
but mostly fucking in the streets! That was 
our crusade —the act. The act was more 


C.I.A offices, they were like, "I don't 
know about this revolution stuff....” !t 
wasn’t funny anymore. 

There was a lot of pressure on us from ail 
different sides of the population of 
underground people. There were a lot of 
facets to it, people into politics, nature, 
drugs, music. When the whole thing was 
just/‘the movement,” it was cool, but when 
it was separated into factions—like you 
talked about “the Weathermen” or "the 
Eastside Motherfuckers” or “the 
Hogfatmers”~it lost the energy. It became 
these people and those people. Somewhere 
in there we got crucified, we got offered up. 


Five finds the visiting California Girls to 
be anything but counter-revolutionary. 

■ 6/68: Blue Cheer, the only Bay Area 
rock band worthy of not being earthquake 
victims, bring their royal loudness into 
the Motor City to share a satanically 
swank triple bill at the Grande Ballroom 
with the Stooges and the MC5. High 
school senior Roger Miller (future 
Mission of Burma guitarist/cvcntual 
nobody) sneaks his dad’s Super 8mm 
equipment in and catches the whole show 
for posterity. The resulting footage still 
airs periodically throughout the metro 
area on local access cable. 


important than the person you did it with 
’cause it represented freedom. Our van was 
like a rolling fucking mattress. And of 
course We used “free love” as a pickup line: 
'Jt was like tf you wouldn't do anything you 
were being counter-revolutionary! 

Fucking was like playing music. In fact, 1 
still look at music like a sex act. The best 
part of the MC5 was the music, ail the 
ta&fng and shit was part of the party, but 
wheat we played, that was revolution. We 
did more tor the revolution in getting 
arrested for saying “Motherfucker’' on stage 
than anybody did throwing dynamite. Kids 
could relate. When we’d get taken away, 
they’d be yelling “Bullshit!” at the cops, 
but when it got to the point of biowing up 


We played a show at the Fillmore East, 
where Bill Graham had this open dialogue 
with the Eastside Motherfuckers, who 
pressured him into letting all the people in 
for free. Street gangs showed up with 
knives and bike chains and it fumed into a 
riot, but the worst part about it was when 
the record company sent a limo down to 
pick us up. We had no other way of getting 
around New York! So the screaming mob 
sees the ‘‘revolutionaries” getting into the 
limo and starts throwing “Kick Out The 
Jams” singles and yelling. “You get in 
those limos and you're dead!” Suddenly we 
were the enemy, we didn't stand for what we 
said we stood for. After that, I don't think 
we ever felt good about anything we did. 






■ 11/68: White Panther Minister and 











all-around good guy Pun Plamondon goes 
underground after allegedly blowing up 
the C.I.A. Recruiting Office in Ann 
Arbor. An ardent environmentalist as 
well as a peoples’ hero, Plamondon is 
apprehended two years later after being 
stopped for throwing an empty beer can 
out the window of his van. 

■ 4/70: After an intolerable six months 
of living with the MC5, Ted Nugent 
packs up his loin cloths, cross bows, and 
meat tcndcrizcr and heads for the hills. 
Says the Nuge "I couldn’t stand their 
hippie ways and filthy habits. I was 
always cleaning up after everybody!” 

■ 7/70: After “poet” Jim Morrison fails 
to get out alive. Iggy Stooge is sought as 
a replacement singer/media event for the 
Doors, but Elcktra execs abort the plan 
after witnessing the Ig deep-throat a mic 
and circumcise himself with a broken 
bottle of Strohs. 

■ 6/72: Motown records (the unwitting 
parent of a generation of mawkishly 
nostalgic, middle-aged Big Chillers to- 
bc) closes shop on Woodward Avenue and 
heads west to Los Angeles. 

■ 11/72: P-Funk's relations with the 
Process Church of the Final Judgement 
take a sharp turn for the worse when 
queen bee Mary Ann “Hectate” 
DeGrimston catches the Thang in 
Cleveland and asks aspiring “Brother” 
George Clinton (the first black man she's 
spoken to since breaking off her 
engagement with Sugar Ray Robinson) 
“What is this ‘funk’ you speak of, I fear it 
may be anti-“Christ” (an alias of Mary's 
hubby Bob). Refusing to give up the 
funk, George soon jumps the “Joyful 
Process ” ship. 

■ 10/73: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 
on a near-lethal mixture of Vemors and 
Mr. Clean, Crccm Magazine co-editor 
Lester Bangs streaks across the infield 
during a heated Tigers-A’s playoff game. 
While spending the night in the Wayne 
County Jail, Bangs borrows a cellmate’s 
well-worn copy of William Burroughs’ 
nonsense epic The Soft Machine, 


metropolis trying to recover its dignity, 
but rather an overwhelmingly negative 
vision of urban violence run amok, a sort of 
Hobbesian Disneyland of arrestable 
offenses. Somewhere in the mid-70s Detroit 
ceased being known as “Hitsville, U.S.A.” 
and started to be referred to as “Murder City, 
U.S.A.,” a tag the city has yet to shake 
(eventhough Washington D.C. is the new 
Number One with a bullet.) Ask anyone who 
isn’t from the area what they know about 
Detroit, and chances are they’ll quickly 
bring up the police car that devoted fans 
flipped over and torched outside Tiger 
Stadium after the victorious 1984 World 
Series. Certainly the city’s perpetual p.r. 
pratfalls (Mayor Coleman Young’s 
hilariously indisputable paternity stink, 
the annual Devil’s Night wienie roast, the 
erecting of an enormous and symbolically- 
clumsy black fist in the middle of a 
downtown boulevard to honor legendary 
fighter Joe Louis, the post-Pistons b-ball 
bacchanal that had more to do with 
Revelations titan it did with Isaih, the New 
York Times Magazine 7/29/90 cover story 
boldly proclaiming “The Tragedy Of 
Detroit,” etc., etc.) have not helped much 
either, giving Detroit a media black eye the 
likes of which only local boxer Thomas 
Heams seemed capable of delivering. (Even 
the mighty Heams is vulnerable to this 
Motown Murphy’s Law; if “the Hitman’s” 
brother was really intent on accidently 
blowing his girlfriend’s head off, he might 
indeed have picked a less publicity¬ 
conscious moment than on the eve of the 
boxer’s long-awaited rematch with Sugar 
Ray Leonard). 

A similar dilemma of image over¬ 
shadowing actuality has plagued the Motor 
City's musical ventures of the last two 
decades. In the latter part of the ’60s, 
around the same time the racial tension in 
the city was boiling towards riot 
temperatures, underskilled suburban burn¬ 
outs, following the time-honored tradition 
of white musicians imitating mo' better 
black ones, plugged in their amps and 
created a crass and messy mixture of 


Motown’s rhythmic heart beat and John 
Coltrane’s holy wail, adding deafening 
distortion via the pre-pinball Who to arrive 
at an unprecedentedly-brutal riff rock. In the 
beginning, it was just a sound: big thick 
guitars, fast power chords, an ample amount 
of feedback, and more than enough wah-wah 
to rearrange the genetic makeup of any 
healthy listener. Unlike the similarly 
straightforward, no-frills thud that followed 
it, however, this music grooved, it swung 
— not merely heavy metal, but something 
much funkier-, noise, maybe, but noise 
raised to the level of art. Henceforth, music 
of such aggressive and oppressive volume, 
intensity, and attitude became synonymous 
with the Detroit area, and by all rights, the 
city can lay claim as the source of pop 
music’s hard rock tributary. But somewhere 
along the way, somebody forgot to 
acknowledge the originators of this 
“Detroit rock and roll," and the accurate 
identities of its pioneers and primary 
practitioners have been clouded and 
obscured. To enter into Detroit radio 
airspace is to discover that “Detroit rock” 
means not the MC5 and the Stooges, but 
Bob Seger and Mitch Ryder; that the 



Old Bob Seger. 


pinnacle of live energy captured on vinyl 
isn’t Kick Out The Jams but Live Bullet ; 
and that the quintessential statement of 
rock music’s power and capabilities isn’t 
Fun House but Night Moves. Abused, 
ignored, and forgotten, Detroit's true 
musical overlords have been forced 
underground, desperately gasping for the air 
and press coverage heaped upon their 
mainstream cousins, with both camps 
fighting spike and vein for the rights to 
tattoo the proper credentials on their 
spindly arms, bandying about the term 
“Detroit rock” like a tennis ball until it has 
been totally emptied of meaning. 

To get at the source of the problem, one 
must lay a good deal of the blame squarely 
on the sagging shoulders of local radio. To 
be sure, the ignorance of FM radio stations 
is a moot point; certainly this kind of 
willful blandness exists all over this great 
and tasteless land. No doubt that when 
Cleveland airmen talk their brand of local 
rock, they don’t mean Pere Ubu or the 








Pagans or the Electric Eels; surely Michael 
Stanley, not John Morton or Crocus 
Behemoth, sports the equivalent of Seger’s 
rock tsar crown. The operative difference, 
however, is that in Detroit the local media 
really, truly believe that Seger, Ryder, el al 
comprise a meaningful thing called “Detroit 
rock and roll” without the contributions of 
the Stooges or the Five. Upon the demise of 
freeform FM formats in favor of corporate 
memo’d playlists, Detroit radio began to 
wallow in the bouldcr-rumped exhortations 
to boogie of a guy like Ryder and has since 
continued in the most logical direction, 
embracing sensationally mediocre/ nation¬ 
ally obscure dullards like the Rockets (who 
no doubt intended to repay their benefactors 
with their chestnut “Turn Up The Radio (I 
Need A Quick Reaction)”) and the Look 
(“We’re gonna rahck/how 'bout you- 
ooh/Don’t you sit on your ahss/and don't 
you be no foo-ooh”), all in the name of 


Mitch Ryder. 


doing their duty to “support local rock and 
roll.” By actively honing the narrowest 
possible definition of that term (read: 
“white”), Motortown air jocks completely 


Mrs. Fred Smith of St Clair 
Shores, Ml, models an 
ultra-attractive cardboard 
barbecue apron. 


nixed homegrown cataclysmic skullfucks 


like “Papa Was A Rolling Stone,” 


“Superstition” (though Stevie Ray 
Vaughn’s virtually identical cover suffered 
from no shortage of air time), “Higher 
Ground,” and the entire Parliament- 
Funkadelic catalogue from their playlists 
and set the stage for what had to be the 
nation’s most virulent anti-disco backlash: 
Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition 
of Disco, commonly known as D.R.E.A.D. 

Now it’s pretty easy to see why music like 
disco, which despite its many and manifest 
flaws was indeed intended to evoke a 
physical reaction beyond reloading the 


already dead, disco wouldn’t have posed 
such a threat. Let’s face it: there’s 
something mighty desperate about having 
to force-feed the fortysomething Bob 
Seger’s marzipan elegies to life-on-the-road 
and fast-fleeting-youth down the ears, 
noses, and throats of a helpless public (I for 
one have the verbatim lyrics to no less than 
25 Seger gems stamped indelibly on the 
creases and folds of my gray matter, and it 
ain't because I slap a copy of Stranger In 
Town on the platter when company is 
over.) 



one-hit pipe, would intimidate the mid-dial 
titans of complacency. But when combined 
with a dose of old-fashioned nellie-phobia, 
the almost-debilitating fear this music 
inspired in these people was downright 
embarrassing: the programming powers- 


While the television media concerns itself 
with focusing on the violence and ugliness 
of the city, local radio is obsessed with 
creating a lily-white, antiseptic image, not 
unlike a rock version of Leave It To Beaver. 
It’s possible (and damn right probable) for 


stumbles across the term “heavy metal 
kids,” and soon begins applying it to 
glitter acts like Mott The Hoople. Later, 
in an east side restroom. Bangs shares a 
nutmeg-laced El Producto with 
Brownsville Station brain trustee Cub 


that-be mobilized the mass issuance of 
Visa-style D.R.E.A.D. cards that allowed 
concerned Detroit rockers to get 10% 
discounts on midnight Molly Hatchett laser 
shows and the latest Head East or Journey 
albums (the early stuff, before they “sold 
out”). It’s obvious that if rock wasn’t 


an R’nR consumer to grow from 
adolescence through to obsolescence 
without ever hearing a snatch of the 
Stooges or the Five. Tuning into the FM in 
the very early a.m. might provide the rare 
and unexpected discovery of hearing a 
particularly enlightened d.j. pay late-night 


Koda, who illustrates the proper (and 
later widely accepted) definition of 
“heavy metal” by puffing and slapping 
out an embryonic, human beat-box 
version of “Smoking In The Boys’ 
Room” on his thighs, lips, and forehead. 
■ 12/73: God officially approves the 





Mothership when three beams of solid 
light strike the fuchsia Mercury Cougar j 
that George C. and Bootsy arc driving 
from Toronto to Detroit. 

■ 3/74: Midway through a particularly ' 
haywire Stooges gig, Iggy targets i 
constipated Creem co-editor Dave Marsh 
for a non-consensual golden shampoo . 
and shower. Unable to repair his split 
ends, the terminally humorless Marsh 
leaves Detroit in a huff, taking his rigid 
and cranky baggage to the Big Apple, 
where he takes over Rolling Stone and 
dedicates himself to the slavish worship 
of Bruce Springsteen and the bitter 
defamation of punk rock. 

■ 2/76: Still freaked-out from Suzi “Oh , 
my God/no time to turn” Quatro’s 
tipsified on-lhrough-thc-off-ramp Bobby j 
Unser imitations, Paul Stanley pens 
“Detroit Rock City.” 

■ 4/76: In one last show of post¬ 
commune togetherness, overly drug- 
friendly cx-MC5 van mates Wayne 
Kramer and Michael Davis wind up in the 
same federal prison in Lexington, KY. 

■ 4/77: Casablanca releases KISS 
ALIVE!, two LPs worth of everybody’s 
favorite lunchbox hcros tearing the roof 
off of Detroit’s Cobo Arena. On the 
album’s back cover, 16-year-old future 
Meatman Tesco Vee (the blonde guy on 
the left sans raised fist) proudly displays 
his felt-tip homage to Gene, Paul, Peter, 
and Ace. 

■ 5/77: Loath to sully the illustrious 
musical legacy of Grand Funk Railroad. 
Mark Famcr takes a cue from Kansas, 
Boston and Chicago and names his new 
rock band after his lovely home town, 
Flint. 

■ 10/78: Fate plays a joker as U of M 
dance student Madonna Louise Cicconc 
emerges from behind the counter at 
Miller's lee Cream and discovers 11-year- 
old future MOTORBOOTY softball team 
member Matt O’Brien barricaded in the 
crapper, hidden behind a heavy cloud of 
checb smoke. Flustered and offended, the 
diligent scoop maiden boots him from 
the parlour and their futures arc forever 
intertwined 

■ 11/78: A buzzed and punchy Jad Fair 
slithers into State Discount and tries to 
stuff a "Oh How I Hate Ohio State” 
sweatshirt into the neo-Hopi bookbag he 
bought at the last Dead show, but is 
caught in the act. After spending a busy 
night in the city hoosegow, Jad (who at 
this point was “luvin’ for a livin’”) never 
quite regains his magic touch with the 
ladies, although his new-found 
loneliness soon proves itself to be rich 
subject matter for 1/2 Japanese song 
lyrics. 

■ 1979: MOTORBOOTY Dis-Minister- 
to-be Rob Michaels trades his birthday 
cassette of Gel The Knack, for a couple 
pinjoints of Thai stick, disavowing any 
regional loyally to number one Knack 
man and Oak Park. MI native Doug 
Fieger. 

■ 1980: Remorseful progenitors of the 



lip service to the Ig, but the requisite spin 
of “Five Foot One” speaks volumes about 
the reference point they’re coming from. 
Iggy Pop might/might not be God and the 
Stooges might/might not be godhead; the 
problem is, if you lived in Detroit, you 
wouldn’t know it either way. The method¬ 
ical process of marginalization is so utter 
and complete as to remove most traces of 
these performers’ very existence, and as the 
mainstream and underground are totally 
polarized, it’s politically difficult/damn 
near impossible for one person to have feet 
in both camps. Thus, the situation of the 
Silverdomc stoning is directly attributable 
to this cruel conundrum: anyone who would 
have attended the Rolling Stones concert 
would have had no idea who Iggy Pop was, 
and anyone who would have known who 
Iggy Pop was wouldn’t have attended a 
Rolling Stones concert. 

Needless to say, the print media hasn’t 
done much to bridge this great divide; 
instead it’s only helped to make Slow- 
Motown a city remarkably indifferent to its 
local music scene. As far as press support 
goes, "Detroit Rock City” is nothing but a 
KISS song. Obviously, Detroit is not a 
major media market like New York or Los 
Angeles, but beyond the perpetual problem 
of very few progressive performance spaces 
there is the added obstacle of no well- 
organized, well-respected alternative media. 
Taking all the above factors into account, it 
comes as no surprise that the mainstream 
dailies herald the middling and the banal, 
running music coverage that consists 
wholly of “in-depth” profiles of whoever 
happens to be so huge that you already 
know all about them from the supermarket 
checkout line, periodic Romantics status 
reports, and “Accent” or “Lively Arts” 
features on the old folks with their 
comeback attempts and detox sagas as they 
try to gain the recognition now for what 
they did 20 years and 60 pounds ago. These 
puff pieces glom any ink that younger 
musicians might aspire to receive, creating 
yet another insidious snowjob in the 
climate of ludicrous looking-back that 
keeps institutions like "classic rock" radio 
and the Stooges Wax Museum in business. 

At the same time as most of the highly- 
paid experts are practicing blindness and 
deafness, there are those local “scene 
enthusiast” scribes for whom anything by 
the hometown folk is holy and sacred and 
not to be damned or described unflatter¬ 


ingly. This attitude of,“Yeah, it might not 
be so original, but come on, these guys are 
from Flat Rock, give ’em a break” erodes 
whatever meager credibility their criticism 
might have and makes all their praise faint 
indeed. If something sucks, it sucks, 
regardless of whether it comes from 
Southfield or San Diego, Birmingham, 
England, or Birmingham, MI. Major 
offenders here are the all-scrub lineup for 
the Metro Times, long the city’s lone 
“alternative voice” and a pretty whispery 
one at that: cold hard hacks like Kevin 
Knapp, Lex Kuhne, and Stewart Francke, to 
name the usual suspects, are spiritual 
stepchildren to the Detroit Free Press' Gary 
“Rap is not music” Graff, a beige and tepid 
writer whose love of mediocrity is rivalled 
only by his hostility to excitement. What 
binds these wags inexorably together is an 
utter inability to recognize anything of 
value, a failing that is so endemic, so 
pervasive,’ as to be positively patho¬ 
logical— always, always, they manage to 
find a way to overlook or omit the truly 
original, truly creative, truly underground 
bands and sounds that are being made, in 
favor of glowing notices for nth-generation 
pub rock drivel by musicians who only now 
have discovered safety pins. This lineage of 
ignorance stretches like a long thin noose 
from the end of the ’60s to the dawn of the 
briefly happening ’80s hardcore movement 
with the (fortunately) Touch And Go- 
documcntcd Necros, L7, and Negative 
Approach, on through to the (foolishly) 
unrecorded p-punk damage of Phobolex, 
SJeep, Urgent Action, and Tom Gemp. All 
of these bands, who proved at least that 
there was something vital and vulgar worth 
covering, wound up beached in their own 
back yards, caught between the 
mainstream's typically icy shoulder and a 
purported alternative that was no less dim 
or lazy. 

But lest we wax too long-winded about 
this whole affair, it’s worth remembering 
that all of this hereditary hubbub is on 
account of two, count ’em, two bands: the 
Stooges and the MC5. Forget bill-padders 
like the the Up, the SRC, and the Rationals. 
Forget the empty-headed, fist-shaking, 
“power to the people” flatulence of folks 
like the Frost and Grand Funk Railroad, 
complete with all the sweat and facial hair 
of a band like the Five but with none of the 
aforementioned’s worldbeating subatomic 
whomp. Disregard bandwagon-jumper Alice 
Cooper; he came from places wester and 
slicker for an Motor City overhaul, but 
only managed to change license plates. 
(And besides, Iggy never used Vampire 
Blood®.) Disqualify Parliament-Funkadelic 
on a technicality; although they were 
sometimes just as bottom- heavy as “the 
Big Two,” they took the rock thing to such 
bodacious afronautic extremes as to be off 
on their own multi-cultural mothership. 
Keep Ted Nugent because of “Cat Scratch 
Fever” and “Stranglehold,” but forget about 
the Amboy Dukes and the rest of his solo 
career (try to forget about the rest of his 
solo career). Add in the Sonic Rendezvous 









Band and the early versions of Destroy All “underground” scene, a subterranean sub- 

Monsters if you insist, but we’re still group that hardly pierced the Earth’s surface 

basically talking spin-off bands here. In but was stone-hard set in all the wrong 

yet another example of image over- ways. In the eyes of local Ritalin-damaged, 

shadowing reality, romantic fans thousands straight-edged chicken-chokers, the Mon- 

of miles outside the Metro area have created sters and co. were no more than Segers and 

a cult of Detroit worship, concocting a Ryders who had failed to make it big, 

mythological rock nirvana where there are bathed in a drug-burned “rock and roll 

free park concerts every day and hippies mystique” that had long become 

who don't stink, and inflating “Detroit unconvincing. It wasn’t until later, after 

Rock” into a sweeping and majestic term hardcore’s first generation had wised up to 

that refers to more than just the sound of its limitations and left it behind to 

two groups. Much to everyone’s mis- costumed clones/clowns, that the local 

fortune, many of these heavily-accented “Class of ’82” admitted their bloodties and 

folks form bands and try to live this little began their current lionization of the 

fantasy, so that whenever your average late- “dynamic duo,” joining the world’s legions 

coming and unimaginative fanzine “writer” of chuzzerai completists in an acquisitive 

starts dropping the D-word, one can be obsession with these fabled two bands’ 

certain that he’s just trying to say that x- accomplishments (the body of which 

band abjectly mimics the Stooges. continues to expand with each bootleg 

But perhaps the strangest thing about all release of Fred Smith tuning an acoustic 

this hoo-ha is how very little of either guitar into a tape recorder.) 
version of “Detroit rock” has had to do with 

Detroit’s post-Pistols musical output. From June ' 1QC>Ci ■ Gamely heralding the release 

the word go, the overwhelming majority of Iggy's latest vinyl stab at recapturing the 

Detroit punk/new wave has ranked among decadence lost after Raw Power, Virgin 

the cheesiest yuk-rock ever to pollute the Records executives bankroll a homecoming 

planet: nothing but skinnv ties, skinnier wingding in Royal Oak, a ' V.I.P. only 

sounds, and “nuts-with-a-V” shenanigans affair for local rock luminaries and media 

that make an evening of Who’s The Boss? hangers-on to rub elbows with the Wild One 

reruns look like a Las Vegas getaway with himself. Figuring that since they'd ignored 

Superfly. Bands like the Mutants (their himwhen he was great, there was no reason 

"Piece O’ Shit” chronicled the life and times to start loving him now, the invitees keep 

of a turd), the Boners (the lead singer’s to themselves, breathy over rumors that the 

“Flying Nun" imitations still strike a raw “guest of honor'"s one-time collaborator, 

nerve), and Angry Red Planet (when seeing David Bowie, might soon grace the soiree 

this otherwise lively group, few could with his regal presence. Suddenly, trumpets 

watch the bassist’s mock-cpilcptic tongue- sound, a side door opens, a red carpet rolls 

wagging Jim Nabors-isms without tossing forth, and Bowie sashays into the room. As 

all of last year’s lunches) quickly turned everyone lines up to kiss Bowie s thin 

Detroit into the Borscht Belt of the Rust white ass, Mr. Pop quietly enjoys the 

Belt, fostering a “Shecky-Green-with-a- munchies by his lonesome, the Rodney 

funny-hat-and-a-farfisa-organ”-type ethic Dangerfield of rock among his own people, 

that continues to this very day. Try these once a S a ‘ n - 

recent superstars on for size: Elvis Hitler, 

Art Phag, Walk The Dogma, See Dick Run, 

Surreal Estate, and the Avant Gardeners, just 
to name a few (ba-dump-bump). This stuff 
almost makes San Francisco look 
happening by comparison. And of course, 
where would such an ethic be without an 
unholy host of bargain-basement Cramps 
knock-offs, guys like Snakeout, the 3-D 
Invisibles, and the Gories, who, after 
spending puberty reading nothing but 
Cracked and goofy monster comix, while 
away their adulthood balls-deep in other 
people’s shopworn goo-goo-muck. 

Even the music that was momentarily 
worthwhile, and which by far owed the most 
to the Stooges and the Five—the 
testosteronic testiness of hardcore—never 
consciously acknowledged its debt. By the 
end of the ’70s, the Stooges’ primary So there you have it. “Detroit rock,” 

living proxy. Destroy All Monsters, had initially an specific sound, then a 

regressed from being one of the last great confusing misnomer, has finally evolved 

local originators to one of the first of the into a velcro buzzword that ought to make 

worst retreads. Rock, as played by the any prudent consumer proceed avec 

Stooges and the Five, had metamorphosed caution. Detroit itself is still the same old 

into “Rock,” complete with truckstop bundle of contradictions that natives have 

cliches and biker get-ups. Destroy All gotten used to, which is to say that most 

Monsters had come to symbolize every- Detroiters have come to accept it for what it 

thing that was wrong with the Michigan is. The rest just move. ■ 



midwest hardcore scene, the pubescent 
Necros release 100 copies of their first 
EP. Produced for a mere S180, this record 
soon commands up to $400 a copy from 
investors/fools. 

■ 3/81: Up and coming hardcore 
iibermenschen Negative Approach 
convene for their first-ever practice in 
the oak-paneled rumpus room of lead 
singer (and future Laughing Hyena) John 
Brannon’s boyhood home in upscale, 
turtleneck-white Grosse Pointe, MI. 

■ 4/81: Hurling caution to the wind and 
prematurely pan-frying his nest egg, ex- 
MC5 drummer Dennis Thompson 
abruptly quits his job programming the 
musical critters at Showbiz Pizza to join 
New Race for a tour of Australia, much to 
the disappointment of anyone awaiting a 
Banana Splits-stylc cover of “Black To 
Comm.” 

■ 11/81: Negative Approach and Bored 
Youth open for a world-weary and 
wrinkled Destroy All Monsters at 
Nunzios Rock Palais in Lincoln Park, 
MI. Daunted by the youngins’ blitz-speed 
scree and miffed by their lack of ancestral 
reverence ("Don’t they know who we arc, 
man?”), the Monsters warn Mr. Nunzio 
that they'll never play with bands like 
that again. 

■ 1985: In the spirit of Grande days 
long past, notorious chicken 
hawk/school teacher “Uncle” Russ Gibb 
gamely attempts to squeeze blood from 
the stony corpse of hardcore by opening 
the Graystone. an all-ages venue where 
ripe young punk lads can show off their 
squeaky-new leather finery, get in fights, 
and serve as mouth-watering eye candy 
for the grinning Mr. Gibb. 

■ 1986: With royalty checks from 
Montrose’s cover of “Kick Out the Jams” 
(re-titled “Rock the Nation") beginning 
to dwindle, bassmeister Michael Davis 
takes to selling “M Go Blue” painters' 
hats outside of Michigan Stadium. Never 
a team to disappoint, the Wolverines rise 
to the occasion and reward Davis with a 
56-14 victory over the fighting Illini. 

■ 1987: While reposing on the 
pavement outside the Graystone Hall 
with his jaw shattered (courtesy of cane- 
wielding representatives of a local white 
power coffee klatch) industrious Touch 
And Go Records Mogul/cstranged Necros 
bass guy Corey Rusk contemplates 
taking nutrition through a straw for the 
next few months and moving operations 
to a friendlier, more Big Black-influcnccd 
locale. 

■ 1990: The Romantics, Detroit’s 
answer to The Sex Pistols and one of the 
few bands to peak commercially (as 
opposed to creatively) with their debut 
album, try to bolster sales of LP number 
seven with a gig at a 200-capacity club in 
Ann Arbor. Embarassed by the sight of 
leather-suited 35-year-olds on their 
knees, the club's promoter finally 
consents, allowing the ‘Tics to perform 
their first bona-fide sell out in almost ten 
years. ■ 





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HOT SPOTS 


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Two Mill STREET 

ANN ARBOR* Nil 


J/m Osterberg, Pioneer High '65 


The next time you find yourself stranded in 
the nostalgic little never-never land of Ann 
Arbor, Michigan, with time on your hands 
and flowers in your hair, be sure to take in the 
“mind-altering” sights and sounds of the 
“World Famous" Stooges Wax Museum. 
Housed in a well-preserved clown-colored 
Victorian mansion that was once the 
headquarters of the White Panther Party, the 
museum towers majestically over an oak-lined 
street of Cleaveresque sorority houses, located 
just off the University of Michigan campus 
and only a stoned throw from the legendary 
"Acid Row" of the ’60s. Just follow the 
steady stream of visiting Frenchmen through 
the historic doors, where Museum Curator 
Woody ‘Tim” Stahl will collect the S10 
suggested donation and lead you directly to the 
museum’s souvenir shop. As you browse 
through the copious assortment of Stooges 
shot glasses and barbecue aprons, Scott 
Ashcton-autographed drumstick fragments. 







rr»nrr 


Peanut butter, 

cremaina, 

and insanely rare 

records: 

Curator Woody 
"Tim" Stahl 
and his Stooge 
Museum 


and Iggy Stooge salt shakers (the salt pours 
out of the lacerations in his chest), Stahl will 
ask you confidentially in his Dexter drawl if 
you want to buy any “ar-ab to burn" 
(marijuana). Even though Ann Arbor's pot 
statutes are renowned for their leniency, 
something about the bouquet and vintage of 
his apparel will cue you that you should 
politely decline. Tell him instead that maybe 
you'll pick up the varnished driftwood wall 
clock emblazoned with a balls-out nude photo 
of Iggy that glows in the dark, on your way 
out. 

"The Stooges, they were the tits, man," 
says the always-revercnt Stahl, whose blurred 
face is circled in an over-enlarged photo (from 
the Stooges’ September '68 Michigan Union 
Ballroom performance) which hangs 
prominently near the entrance to the “Hall of 
Items.” “I must've seen them eleven, 
twelve....hell, twenty times,” Stahl recalls 
fondly, “Iggy even kicked me in the nuts 
once.” 

Entering the hall itself you'll discover such 
priceless Stooges artifacts as the Hoover 


Upright that Iggy played at the Psychedelic 
Stooges' first show in 1967, Ron Asheton’s 
exhaustive collection of Nazi knick-knacks, 
the jar of peanut butter Iggy spead all over 
himself at the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival, 
and a small shrine with the ashes of Dave 
Alexander, the Stooges' original bass player, 
who drank himself to death in 1975. In an 
adjoining room is a small screening area, 
where the many low-budget horror films in 
which Ron Ashcton has appeared are run on a 
perpetual loop, and a listening booth, where 
you can choose from the museum's collection 
of over 250 bootlegs and foreign pressings of 
the same 23 Stooges songs that arc available 
domestically. 

Of course, the highlight of the museum is 
the gallery of “incredibly life-like” wax 
replicas of all the band members, including 
such extraneous Stooges as Scott Thurston, 
Billy Cheatham, and James Williamson. 
Fortunately, the figures are labelled, as it's 
hard to tell exactly who's supposed to be 
who. “I just got sick of people asking me 
what Joanne Whorley was doing in here,” 


complains Stahl, “I had to keep telling them 
That’s Zeke Zettner! Zeke fucking Zettner!’” 

After wandering agog through the exhibits, 
head out back to the “picturesque” concession 
area/snack bar that faces the rusting remains 
of the actual Airstream trailer home where 
Iggy was raised, and self-consciously order an 
“I Wanna Be Your Chili Dog,” some “Real 
Cool Fries,” and a frosted “Shake Appeal” 
from a bosomy matron with “Rock Action” 
tattooed on her ample forearm. While you’re 
eating, you can check out one of the many 
visiting Australian Stooges tribute bands 
performing live re-creations of unidentifiable 
Stooges hits on a makeshift facsimile of the 
West Park band shell. As you leave 
unreluctantly, the balding Stahl offers an 
apology for the earnest-but-clueless 
youngsters on the stage, “They're okay, but 
back in the Sixties, we all grew hair like that 
for real.” 

The Stooges Wax Museum, 1520 Hill 
St., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Open 
noonlsh 'til whenever, every day but 
Tuesday and Friday and Monday. 








Although he'd never say so himself, Gary “Speak Softly And Carry A ,3mm 
Rapldograph" Grimshaw’s once-ubiquitous concert posters, handbills, and all¬ 
purpose revo-hippy propaganda made him the visual architect of the Detroit Sixties. 
Like many of his contemporaries, the young Grimshaw's mldwestern mind was blown 
by the psychedelic poster art he saw while visiting pre-Summer of Love San Francisco, 
but upon returning home he quickly developed a tight, balanced style that was much 
more Hamtramck than It was Haight Street. A consumate pro and self-described “team 
player," Grlmshaw starred for legendary hash-era outfits like the MCS, the Grande 
Ballroom, and the White Panthers before they all folded and he found himself 
schlepping for bush-leaguers like The Urbatlons and the declining Creem Magazine. 
But in due time, nostalglc/lnvestment-mlnded ex-longhalrs started making long green 
and all things Sixties became collectible, so much so that Grimshaw's work has gained 
cash value as well as recognition. Grlmshaw himself is now happily back at the old 
drawing board full-time, designing new posters and dealing old ones as the art director 
of ArtRock, a wildly lucrative Frisco-by-way-of-Ann Arbor poster business (necessary 
plug). We spoke to Grimshaw in Ann Arbor’s greasiest greasy spoon just before he 
blew out of town. 




Grimshaw's first art lob, 1966. 

■ You’re from Detroit? 

■ Yeah. Bom in Detroit, lived there most 
of my life. I was living in Boston and 
San Francisco, New York, L.A. and Ann 
Arbor at different times, and I was in the 
service for two years, from 1964 to ’66. 

■ Right out of high school? 

■ Pretty much. I worked for a year at 
Great Lakes Steel, then joined the Navy 
because I didn’t want to get drafted. 

■ If you volunteered your hitch 
was shorter? 

■ Right. They were on a big recruiting 
drive because the air war in Viet Nam was 
escalating like crazy, but they hadn’t 
started the ground war yet, so the Air 
Force and the Navy were just recruiting 
like mad. I never went to college. I 
learned the technical end of the art 
business from my uncle, who printed all 
the Grande Ballroom posters. He had a 
shop in Dearborn and I just learned it on 
the job. I was drawing all the time. There 
are a lot of artists and people into graphic 
arts and design in my family. When I was 
in high school my best friend was Rob 
Tyner, the lead singer of the MC5. He and 
I used to do T-shirts, just like Stanley 
Mouse. We didn’t have air brushes so we’d 
draw them with permanent markers. He 
would draw them and I’d color them in. He 
actually did a lot more than I did. We sold 
some, gave some to friends. It wasn’t a 
business, though. The first art job that I 
actually got paid for was the first Grande 
Ballroom poster, for the first Grande 
Ballroom show, which was with the MC5 
in 1966. 

■ So the MCS went to your high 
school? 

■ Yeah, I think they all went to Lincoln 
Park High, except for Michael Davis, the 
bass player. He came into the band later. 
The MC5 got together in 1963. They were 







in high school and they were basically a 
blues band. I worked a lot in high school 
and didn't do a lot of hanging out, but 
when I did I hung out with Rob. 

I was in the South China Sea on the 
USS Coral Sea aircraft carrier and we were 
in the warzone for seven months. For the 
last part of my hitch the ship had to go 
into dry dock in San Francisco for repairs. 
The first day I had liberty the headlines in 
the Hearst papers were "Peace March 
Today,” because it was the day of the 
second big Berkeley peace march from the 
campus to Oakland. The first one had 
ended in a riot where the Hell’s Angels 
were beating up the peaceniks while the 
Oakland police just stood around 
watching. After that Allen Ginsberg went 
over to the Hell’s Angels and got them to 
participate in the next one. I got some 
civilian clothes, took a bus over to 
Berkeley, and just marched with the 
march. It was the first day I was back and 
it was fascinating. I was aware of the beat 
culture in the fifties, and I was aware of 
what the left/hip culture was like, but I’d 
never seen anything on such a mass scale. 
There were probably five or six thousand 
people in the march and the whole circus 
surrounding it. 1 went back to Detroit 
several times from 1966 to '70, but most 
of that time I lived in the Bay Area. 

■ Were the psychedelic posters 
happening when you arrived in 
San Francisco? 

■ Yes. I started going to the Fillmore and 
the Avalon. When I came in during the 
early spring of 1966 the posters were just 
starting to go. In the Filmore and Avalon 
series they were up to number six or 
seven and you'd see them in all the buses. 
That’s where I’d always see them. And if 
you walked around anywhere, a third of 
the storefronts had a poster in them. You 


u*4«u; *>/*S ••IHK’l « 



went to the hip record stores and they’d 
have a stack of them on the counter and 
you’d just take what you wanted, right off 
the press. The same ones that are selling 
for twenty dollars apiece now. At that 
point I worked for an underground 
newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle, for 
thirteen issues or so. I got a lot of work 
in the Oracle, but I didn’t do any conceit 

■ What was the Oracle like? 

■ It was a very creative place—a lot of 
people going in and? out all the time. I 
always thought it was pretty disorganized 
mysel|, but I liked working there. I hadn’t 
done newspaper work before that, but I did 
a lot of work on the Fifth Estate when I 
was in Detroit during the summer of '67. 
It was put together by Peter Werbe and 
Harvey Ovshinsky. They knew me as the 
Grande Ballroom artist, so I designed 
Grande ads for them and did some logos, 
but I didn't do layout. Peter Werbe handled 
most of that. I wasn’t a full-time person 
there or anything like that. At the time I 
was more interested in the Grande 
Ballroom because I did the light show 
there every weekend. 

■ What was the light show like? 

H It was very similar to the light show 
that they had at the Avalon and Fillmore. 
Liquid projections, slides, strobes. The 
liquid projections were done on a regular 
overhead projector like you see in 
schools, only with a real high-watt bulb. 
The glasses we used were actually watch 
glasses, like clock faces. They were 
curved and filled with colored liquid, and 
we’d float different sizes of them inside 
each other, with different colors inside 
each of the glasses. There were lots of 
slides, too. Leni Sinclair was the main 
photographer who worked on the light 
show, which was called “Pisces Eyes.” 



About a half a dozen people were the 
regulars for the light show, because there 
were three overheads and four slide 
projectors going at once. 

■ Was it all coordinated? 

■ Yeah, about as coordinated as we could 
get it! 

■ When did you first meet John 
Sinclair? 

■ It was at a party that his wife Leni 
threw for him when he got out of the 
Detroit House of Corrections after his 
second bust. There was poetry reading all 
day long and jazz bands, and all the 
people that John had worked with in the 
past were there. And at the end of the 
evening tFie MC5 played, and that’s when 
I met. John and that’s when John met the 
MCS and that all happened at that time. 
That was in 1966. 

Later I was in a communal living 
situation with John and Leni and a couple 
other people, and we put out a paper. 
John was into publishing, he had already 
published a lot of poetry books. We had 
our own shop. We had a mimeograph 
machine and a stencil maker and we put 
out a paper called The Warren Forest Sun. 
It was an alternative to the Fifth Estate, 
but it was like the Oracle, it wasn’t 
published on a very regular schedule. We 
put out about six or seven issues during 
1967 and early '68. When I went back to 
California in '69, I was the production 
manager of the Berkeley Tribe for about a 
year. 

■ That was a really big time for 

underground publishing. 

■ Yeah, the underground press was going 
like mad, there was one in every city. 
They had an arrangement where every 
paper would send a copy to every other 
paper, as part of the underground press 
syndicate. Since we put out a paper we 















would get all the underground papers from 
all over the country. When you’d see them 
come in every day you'd realize what a 
big phenomenon it was. Some of them 
were great, like the East Village Other and 
the Chicago Seed, just really good 
papers. The LA. Free Press and the 
Berkeley Barb were some of the more 
original ones, the founders of the whole 
concept. The Tribe was interesting 
because at the beginning it was composed 
of Berkeley Barb staffers who went on 
strike against Max, the owner. I think it 
was mainly a matter of political 
differences—they thought he was more 
reactionary and aligned with the hip 
merchants more than anything else. He 
wouldn’t give up any editorial control, so 
they split. But he hired a whole new staff, 
so Berkeley had two underground 
newspapers. It probably could’ve 
supported three or four. I don’t remember 
any actual circulation figures on the Tribe, 
but it was in the hundred thousand range. 
Hundreds and hundreds of people in the 
Bay Area depended on the underground 
press for a living. Papers would come in 
Friday morning and there’d be a line of 
people to buy them, actually waiting for 
them. Then the staff would sell them on 
the street all weekend and make enough 


money to support themselves. Tourism is 
a big industry in the Bay Area. There are a 
lot of people on the street all the time, so 
they could really sell a lot of papers. No 
freeways. In Detroit if you want to get 
somebody’s attention you have to buy 
radio time, so they can listen to it when 
they’re driving in their car. 

■ But that wasn’t how the shows 
at the Grande were advertised. 

■ No, Russ Gibb depended pretty much on 
the posters. But he had a network of high 
school students to help with distribution. 
He built this up so that when the cards 
came out they would just be distributed in 
a pyramid system and they'd go through 
all the high schools in Detroit. The 
students were pretty organized. They’d get 
a stack of cards, pass them out in school 
and then they’d get into the Grande free. 

■ Was it mainly handbills instead 
of posters? 

■ They started out doing both. But since 
posters are good in store fronts and since 
Plum Street was probably the only place 
where there was foot traffic, the posters 
weren’t really functional. They did maybe 
a dozen posters and cards before they 
switched to cards only. 

The Grande stuff was all done in one 
day, tops. As soon as I got the 



information I just started working on it 
and didn't stop until it was done. I'd take 
it to the printer and come home and crash. 
It was just panic. I didn’t even have time 
to think about it, which is probably good 
because the first impulse about a design is 
usually right. It’s just that they weren’t 
executed as well as they could’ve been. I 
think I started out at about $25 for a 
poster design, and by ’69 I eventually 
got up to about $75. $35 or $40 was the 
average payment for artwork. At that time 
the Avalon and Fillmore were paying 
between $200 and $300. The Grande 
budget was miniscule compared to that. 
Also, the Avalon and Fillmore would 
book far enough ahead that they could 
give the artists two or three weeks to 
work on the posters. So these were done 
under a lot more difficult circumstances. 

John started working with the MC5 
more and more as their manager during the 
time I was involved with the Grande. The 
place where I had been living evolved 
into the MC5 house, and I moved out, 
because I preferred to have my own place. 
They moved to Ann Arbor and then I 
moved to Ann Arbor, and then I moved to 
Boston and later Berkeley, and was gone 
for 1968 and '69. During that time the 
MC5 and the White Panthers evolved in 
Ann Arbor and I wasn’t part of the 
original inception of all that. But I was in 
constant contact with them over the 
phone and through letters and I did 
artwork for them and sent it to them. I 
was “Minister Of Art In Exile.” So I was 
still connected to what Was going on in 
Detroit, but I wasn’t doing Grande stuff 
anymore. Carl Lundgren took over that. 
The MC5 recorded their first album at the 
Grande on Halloween in '68. I did a 
design for the cover, but Elektra Records 
had their own art department and a full¬ 
time art director and all their album covers 
had the same look to them. The same guy 
who did the Doors covers did the MC5 
cover. So they rejected my design on that 
basis and the MC5 didn’t have it in their 










contract to have artistic control over their 
covers. 

I was mainly in Boston to study 
macrobiotics. 1 was macrobiotic all the 
time I was there and ate basically grains 
and vegetables, ate no meat or diary 
products, and I didn't use any drugs or 
smoke pot. Well, maybe a little. But 
macrobiotics was what I was there for. At 
the end of 1968, before the winter hit, I 
moved to California. We drove across the 
country in a van. I lived in Berkeley and 
San Francisco from late 1968 to early 
’70, working on the Tribe and doing 
underground comics. Carl Lundgren was 
out in San Francisco then, and he and I 
put out two issues of an underground 
comic, Tales From The Ozone, and I also 
contributed some panels to Slow Death. I 
never felt very comfortable doing comics 
because it’s hard for me to work within a 
literary frame of reference. A comic is 
basically an illustrated story. I'd always 
get bogged down on the pictures and 
forget the story. I feel a lot more 
comfortable doing posters than I do 
comics. 

I went “underground” during that time 
because there was a warrant out for my 
arrest, for possession with intent to sell 
marijuana. I think that’s what the charge 
was. Eventually I lined up a good lawyer 
and figured out what the case was and 
realized it was something we could beat. 
Then I came back and surrendered and went 
through the court proceedings. In 1968 
the charge was a ten-year felony. I was 
basically facing the same charges that 
John Sinclair had been incarcerated for a 
couple years for, but by the time my case 
went to trial, the freedom rally had 



PHOTO: IVOR DAVIDSON 


Gary Grimshaw in 1968. 



Reject sleeve art for the MC5's Kick Out The Jams 


happened at Crisler Arena, and they 
changed the law—virtually the next day— 
from a ten-year felony to a six-month 
misdemeanor. The charge was in Traverse 
City and they immediately dropped it 
because it wasn't worth the trouble. So 1 
had it dropped, but it did keep me away 
from Michigan for two years. During that 
time, there was so much going on that I 
figured I’d just get lost in the shuffle. But 
the FBI did show up at the Tribe office in 
Berkeley. At that time Pun Plamondon 
(Gun-totin' White Panther honcho accused 
of blowing up a recruiting station—edj 
was on the ten most wanted list, charged 
for conspiracy to destroy government 
property. I think because they were 
looking for him they were also looking 
for me. I was in touch with David 
Sinclair, who was the head of the White 
Panthers and the John Sinclair Freedom 
Fund and the whole effort to get him out. 
So they coordinated my legal problems 
with his and I came back and worked full¬ 
time through all of '70 and most of '71 
under David’s direction, doing “Free John 
Now” stuff and posters for shows at 
Crisler and Eastern Michigan. John 
finally got out in October of '71. 

■ So your involvement with the 
White Panther Party was pretty 
heavy? 

■ Oh yeah, I was very sympathetic to it. 
At the time the war was really going to 


the roof, the anti-war movement was 
really heavy and it didn't seem like we 
could get anything done or changed 
through normal democratic channels. And 
it caused a lot of people to stop and think 
about having to get organized outside of 
the system. So that’s the kind of attitude 
that was going around generally, and for 
me personally, especially when I got out 
to California, working on the Berkeley 
Tribe. People into radical politics related 
more to the Tribe than any other 
newspaper, and they were very 
sympathetic to what the White Panthers 
were doing in Ann Arbor. So the whole 
mood of everything escalated for me. As I 
said, I worked full-time for the White 
Panthers in Ann Arbor. Then the White 
Panthers evolved into a different kind of 
organization called the Rainbow People’s 
Party. They started running food co-ops 
and forming coalitions with other 
organizations in Ann Arbor to run 
candidates for City Council and change 
the local laws. The White Panthers were 
frightening to people. That was one part 
of the reason why the name was changed 
and the general attitude of the people in 
the White Panther Party changed. They 
thought it was more effective to have a 
positive image. To put it in a time frame, 
now we’re talking about late '71, ’72, 
after John was released. John hooked up 
with Pete Andrews and did two Blues and 






The chronically-incarcerated White Panthers provided Grimshaw with plenty of work. 


Jazz Festivals in Ann Arbor in ’72 and 
’73, so the Rainbow People’s Party 
evolved into Rainbow Productions, 
because we had to organize a business in 
order to put on the shows. I was the art 
director of the Blues and Jazz Festivals 
both years, and I worked full-time, doing 
all the advertising and press kits and 
things like that. A lot of the things that 
the Rainbow People’s Party—and before 
that the White Panther Party—was doing, 
like publishing a newspaper and running 
food co-ops and things like that, were 
turned over to other people in Ann Arbor. 
Other people got involved, and once the 
organization was set up, they did it and 
we didn’t have to do it. All the things we 
set out to do, we more or less 
accomplished, one by one. 

Eventually, things progressed to a 
point where I was just burned out. It was 
just really intense all the time. By '74 the 
organization as a whole wasn’t under the 
gun the way it had been. At that point 


Nixon was having to give up the war and 
Coleman Young got elected Mayor of 
Detroit. The end of the war put a pin in 
the big balloon of the Sixties, because it 
was all pretty much organized around the 
anti-war movement. Politically, things 
were turning over really fast. Culturally 
too, in that the whole generational 
tension was dissipating because the young 
people who had pushed it to a head in the 
sixties were having their own families, 
and the older generation that had been 
lined up against them was softening its 
attitudes. All the tension went out of 
those situations, and everything changed. 
Everybody was basically just trying to 
keep their lives together. At that point I 
just wanted to get out of Ann Arbor 
because it was very claustrophobic to me. 
So in '74 I sort of cut my ties with John 
and the organization and moved to 
Detroit, which I always considered my 
hometown. Later, John moved to Detroit, 
and we’ve worked together several times 


since then. In Detroit I free-lanced, did 
advertising graphics for Bamboo 
Productions, who did all the big shows at 
Cobo Hall, and did lay-up for Creem 
Magazine. 

■ Robert Williams once said that 
artists who did rock album covers 
or posters never got the kind of 
acclaim for their work that the 
musicians did. 

■ Well that kind of acclaim is the payoff 
in the music business. If you do make it, 
the scale of success is so huge that it’s 
just unbelievable how big you make it. 
With graphic arts and visual arts in 
general, you never get to that point. But 
although a visual artist’s fame grows 
slowly, it’s more secure. When you create 
a piece of work, the work’s still there. It 
doesn’t go away. In that way, being a 
musician is a lot tougher than being a 
visual artist, because in music you put out 
all this energy, and the minute you stop 
playing, it’s gone. And to record it—to 














13 . 3 . 


HAMBURG is 
DOCKS 


12 . 5 . HAMBURG 

MartrthaBe 


GEORGE CLINTON 


THE P-FUNK ALLSTARS 


SMOKING SECTION 
FROtt 8 SATURCWY • OCrOttR 20 S 21 


NF#12C 


KRT1 


z&iii 


ORIGINAL 
ROCK 
CONCERT 
P O S T E R S 

POSTER DESIGN BY 
GARY GRIMSHAW 
STANLEY MOUSE • RICK 

GRIFFIN ■ VICTOR 

MOSCOSO • ALTON 
KELLEY • WES WILSON 

DAVID SINGER • STORM 

THORGERSON 

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PCL#4.22x28.5.$10. 

TO ORDER BY VISA, MASTER¬ 
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262-7249. TO ORDER BY MAIL, 
SEND CHECK OR MONEY 
ORDER FOR PURCHASE 
PRICE PLUS SHIPPING (1 
POSTER: $3.50/ 2-4: $4.00/ 5 OR 
MORE: $5.00). CA RESIDENTS 
ADD 6.75% SALES TAX. FOR 
A FULL-COLOR CATA¬ 
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Iggy's Instinct: thanks to Crimshaw, at least it looks good 


make an object out of it that you can hold 
in your hand—is enormously expensive. 
Most of what a musician does just 
dissipates into the air. Whereas 
everything I do—some of it will get lost 
or destroyed or something, but most of it 
still exists somewhere. 

■ Earlier you said the kids of the 
Sixties became the parents of the 
Seventies. Now they’re nostalgic 
and they’ve got money to spend 
on things like old posters, which 
makes businesses like ArtRock 
possible. 

■ Right, and they remember seeing the 
posters. And they say "I used to have one 
of those, I got it down at the record store, 
or a friend brought it back from San 
Francisco. Where is it?” And they go 
digging around and they realize it got lost 
or folded up or something, and they see 
an ad in Rolling Stone that they can get 
fresh copies. Originals, not reprints. Just 
like the one they had. There have been 
other companies that have had these 
posters available, but they just didn’t 
market them well. It’s not really 
nostalgia, because nostalgia’s kind of a 
dirty word in some people’s minds. Both 
the artwork and the music from that period 
were very good. When young people 
today hear it, they like it. It rings a bell. 
They recognize what an exciting period of 
time it was and they probably wish that 
something like that was going on today. 
Plus young people are like a minority 
today. Population-wise, they don’t have 
the impact that they did then. There was a 
bulge in population and the sheer numbers 
were huge. Now the numbers are very 
small and young people just don’t have 
any power anymore. Life can be very dull 
and dismal for a young person growing up 
today. I’m glad I’m not growing up today, 
I had more fun then! 

The past doesn’t go away, it’s still 
there. It exists in everybody’s mind and 
in artifacts. The present is just an 
accumulation of all the past, so it’s not 
gone, it’s still here. 

■ Do you see what happened to 

the psychedelic posters 

happening with punk flyers and 
art, seeing that the quality of the 
punk stuff isn’t as high? 

■ Well it couldn’t be. As I said, there 
was a whole change in the economic 
situation. There was a lot of money 
floating around in 1966. Everybody was 
rich. You didn’t worry about paying rent 
or anything. If you wanted to do a three- 
color poster, you could probably get one 
printed real cheap. The promoters and the 
bands could afford to do colorful, 
extravagant things. When it got to the 
late ’70s and ’80s, just putting a black 
and white flyer together was a big deal. 
You put as much work, energy and money 
into that as would go into a three-color 
poster ten years earlier. I know during the 
oil crisis, the cost of printing tripled. So 
things had to change. The artwork that 


was done faster and simpler, like the cut¬ 
up collage approach to making flyers and 
the black and white printing, fit the time 
that it happened in perfectly. It was the 
only way you could do things. You didn’t 
have the option of taking two or three 
weeks and doing a full-color poster. 
Things were happening faster, and the art 
changed to fit the situation. It was what it 
had to be at that time. I thought the 
whole punk thing, starting with the 
Ramones and the Sex Pistols, was great. 
It’s influenced everything that’s gone on 
since. As far as the punk stuff being 
worth money, it already is. There are 
plenty of people who collect that stuff 
and pay big money for it. 

■ Is there a story behind the 
cover you did for Iggy Pop’s 
record? 

■ That came about when the poster I did 
for his week of shows at Bookie's in 
1980 appeared in The Art Of Rock. He 
saw that and remembered me and 
remembered that the First time he'd ever 
seen the word "Stooges” in print was on a 
poster that I did. He put all that together 
and thought “Why don’t I fmd out where 
this guy is and see if he can do an album 
cover for me?” He wanted to do a hard 
rock album. He’d just finished a tour with 
an album that had been produced by David 
Bowie. It was a very studio-oriented album 
that was more focused on him as a soloist 


and not as a member of a band. It was 
successful, but he wanted to come back 
with an album that was band-oriented. He 
planned to put together a really good 
band, work out all the tunes with the 
band, then make the record. So he called 
me up and I was really excited, I got to do 
an album cover for Iggy. He flew me to 
New York for a weekend. When I got 
there, the band played the whole album 
for me. They played side one, took a 
break and had Chinese food, then played 
side two. So I immediately knew what my 
work would be used for. The next day I 
worked up some sketches and went back 
and forth to his place and got the basic 
feel for it down. I came up with the 
design, but he participated in the design a 
lot. 

■ You’ve said that you’re a “team 
player." 

■ Well, flat-out I’m a commercial artist. 
The work I do is mass art, as opposed to 
fine art. It isn’t for display in a gallery, 
it's for printing. Commercial art is a good 
medium for what’s going on, and it’s 
more democratic than fine art because it 
isn’t exclusive. There are thousands of 
copies of each work, so anyone can see or 
even own it. When I do a poster, there’s 
input from the promoter, the band, a lot 
of people other than me. I am a team 
player, but I can pick which team I want 
to be on. ■ 






CAROLINE 

© 1990 Caroline Records. Inc. 


east coast CAROLINE RECORDS, INC- 114 WEST 26th STREET, NEW YORK, N.Y, lOOOl _ 

west coast CAROLINE RECORDS CALIFORNIA, INC., 12410 FOOTHILL BLVD., UNIT B, SYLAAAR, CA 91342 




REPORTED BY J.G. ALLEN 


The crowd comes to its feet, clapping and 
hooting as Detroit rock stalwart Ted Nugent 
strides into the hall, his permed mane, 
floor-length fox fur coat and semi-attractive 
wife Shemane flowing behind him. 
Throughout the over-stuffed auditorium, 
exhuberant fans jostle, shove, and finally 
kick-box each other for a better view of the 
normally loin cloth-clad star, who 
eventually reaches the microphone and 
greets them all with a hearty, “Sit down and 
SHUT THE FUCK UP!” 

This is not the Nth Annual Whiplash 
Bash, the long-threatened Amboy Dukes 
reunion concert, or the kickoff brunch for 
the Damn Yankees MTV weekend, and there 
isn’t a single doob-huffing downriver head- 
banger in the crowd. No, this is the Milford 
(Michigan) Township Hall, these people in 
eyesore-orange vests and camouflage golf 
hats are fully-grown adults, and this time 
it's the U.S. Constitution, not gonzo R&R. 
that has brought Nugent to the mic. 

See, it seems that the rapidly yuppifying 
populace of this fast-growing burg didn’t 
realize it was moving into one of the 


region’s happiest hunting grounds. Weary 
of buckshot holes in their picture windows 
and hunting boot tracks through their 
meticulously-tended Japanese shrubs, a 
group of immigrant Milfordites have tried 
to ban the nasty sport, along with skecl 
shooting and even backyard target practice. 
Enter Nugent, the Jesse Jackson of hunting 
crises. 

Easily the most vocal recreational animal 
killer in the state, Nugent is now better 
known for his hunting exploits than for his 
hose-rock prowess. “Shit,” remarks one 
hunting enthusiast, “I know Ted hasn’t 
written a fresh riff since ’75, but last year 
he bagged a near-record black bear with 
only a 45 pound bow.” 

In the course of his oratorty, Nugent 
ruminates on American tradition, opining 
that “to ban an individual shooting his 
semi-automatic weapon in his backyard, 
that’s not the America I know. You may as 
well ban poontang.” Addressing the non¬ 
hunters in the audience, he explains 
that,“Hunting isn’t like going bowling. 
It’s not like taking a picture. It’s not like 


just looking at a mini skirt. You have to get 
into that shit, you’ve got to use it! Animals 
were put there for human beings to use, and 
anyone who says that man isn’t a predator 
is a dipshit! The only way I can describe it 
is that it's like childbirth. That’s the only 
feeling that would come close. It’s not just 
a slaughter, it’s a challenge. It’s the life 
blood of us hunters.” 

In his final plea, the Nuge appeals to equal 
rights. “What’s good for you isn't 
necessarily good for me. I would never say 
everyone has to kill and butcher their own 
food, and I don’t think you should be able 
to tell me I have to buy mine at the A&P.” 
With the crowd already beginning to 
applaud, Ted concludes on a philosophical 
note, reminding us that, “Everybody has to 
whack something, even if it's only time." 

As Ted leaves the podium, anti-hunting 
forces fear for the life of their proposal and 
consider enlisting a rock and roll 
spokesman of their own. “It’s too bad Harry 
Chapin’s dead,” grouses one hunting-hater, 
“But maybe we could get Michael Stipe to 
do it.” ■ 






A MOTOR BOOTY INTERVIEW BY HENSSLER, 
O'BRIEN AND DURR, “WITH" ROB MICHAELS 

No doubt the name Ron Asheton rings a loud and distorted bell in 
the hemp-stained craniums of most MOTORBOOTY readers. During 
his tenure with the underground’s sacredest rock and roll cow, the 
Stooges, Mr. Asheton bludgeoned countless brain cells straight 
back to the Big Bang, laying down the meanest, rawest, and 
thickest six-string wail the Earth had ever heard. On Funhouse, the 
Stooges' second and finest album, he honed his manic craft to 
perfection, spewing layer upon layer of throbbing metallic grit and 
inspiring successive generations of sycophantic imitators. Post 
Iggy, Asheton continued the heavy rock thing, first with Joe 
Besseresque Stooge Scott Thurston and MC5 drummer Dennis 



Thompson, ne Dennis Tomich, in New Order (not to be confused 
with that sissy limey outfit), then secondly and most notoriously 
with Destroy All Monsters (featuring Creem Dream runner-up 
Niagara, nee Lynn Rovner, on vocals), not to mention stints with 
Deniz Tek's New Race and an inconsequential current project. Dark 
Carnival. Now a leading man in off-off-Hollywood hort or flicks, 
Asheton still lives with his Mother in Ann Arbor, where 
MOTORBOOTY finally caught up with him in his T.V. Room. 

■ MOTORBOOTY: We heard your most recent movie 
role was playing a nun. 

■ RON ASHETON: Yes, I did tha: in a movie called Them that was 
filmed at the mental institution in Pontiac, MI. I was in this nun- 
type costume, with a rubber forehead. We were the Jim Jones cult so 
we had upside down “J’s" burned in our foreheads. They had this 







Ron Asheton fills in lor his favorite stooge 


ON ASHETON 












“We just wanted 


army jacket. The idea was just to film lots of falls. Some of the guys 
really ended up getting hurt because they’d pick up so much speed 
falling down the hills. Or we’d make vampire-type movies, just 
lurking around in the old Stooges band house that used to be out on 
Packard Road. We’d get things dark, and we’d get girls to be in bed 
with hardly anything on and we’d come in and bite ’em or knife 
’em. 

■ Did you and your brother fight a lot? 

■ No, not really. He’s younger by a year. We never fought but after 
being on the road with him...you know how guys double up in a 
room? I used to request another room away from him. 

■ Why? 

■ Well just because I’d done everything with him all of my life. 
We shared a room until I was seventeen. It was just his lifestyle. 
He’s a slob, he’s real messy. It’s kinda like a Felix and Oscar 


situation. It’s not like I'm that much of a Felix, but sometimes I'd 


little kid made up to look like a midget, sorta this little monkey 
man with hair all over. In the movie we take this drug that makes us 
really strong and crazy, and then we start deteriorating, we get 
pretty gruesome, and start killing a bunch of people. The lead actor 
was John Saxon, so I was actually playing John Saxon’s wife. 
Every time he saw me he’d start shaking his head and laughing. I’m 
not sure when it’s going to come out. In the meantime our cotppany 
has done something called The Wendigo. I get top bill as a drunken 
hunter who lets this giant caribou-shaped evil spirit loose. We just 
got a script that they might be interested in about a rock and roller 
who’s turning 40 and still rockin’ and trying to cope with all the 
weirdness. They sent the script to Bob Seger, but he wouldn’t even 
return their call, so now they’ve brought up me playing the part. 

■ How did you get into movies? 

■ We made Super-8mm films in high school, just crazed monster 
films. 

■ Were you the star? 

■ Well we’d take turns. Most of the time I would be the vampire or 
Dr. Mabuse. We’d take turns being cameraman, but mostly I just 
liked being the actor. 

■ Did your brother Scott ever help out? 

■ Yeah, I forget the title but I played Hitler and it was Hitler on the 
moon, getting his army of Nazis together to invade Ann Arbor. So 
we went down to the Diag on the U of M campus and we just kept 
saying, “Hey everyone would’ you mind stopping and pointing up 
like this?” A buncha people finally did it so we were like,“Shit, turn 
on the camera!” My brother was in an assassination scene up on the 
roof of a parking structure and he had this plastic pistol, and 
someone thought it was a real gun. So I'm up there filming and next 
thing you know I hear screeching tires coming up the parking 
structure and I know it’s the cops. He just told us to stop, but after 
that my brother wanted nothing to do with it. 

■ Did you make a lot of films in high school? 

■ We did about maybe ten of them. One of them was palled The 
Strange Jew. I played Hitler in that one also. Bill Cheatham, who 
was later in the Stooges for about six weeks, played the strange 
Jew. He was strange because he wore one red glove. So he comes in, 
we've got the guys wearing all my Nazi uniforms and we brand him 
and he takes the wine from us and rips off his shirt and it says 
“Superjcw” with a big Star of David. He killed all the Nazis but he 
did it in weird ways, like by the smell of his armpit. I think I have 
that one, it's the only one that survived. Another one was simply 
entitled Stories Of The War and we’d just go out where they were 
building the expressway and pretend to be S.S. snipers shooting 
the other soldiers. I didn’t want to get my German uniforms dirty, 
so we would just use the German helmets and armbands and an old 


just wanna be quiet and he’d wanna party. I'd be almost asleep and 
next tiling you know there’s like five girls and a bunch of guys, 
clouds of smoke, and I’d be like, “Yeah this is great, we only have 
to be up and catch a plane in four hours.” So a lot of times I would 
just find the room that was farthest away from them. 

As kids we had this thing where every night after dinner we’d go 
* out and wrestle in the back yard and a lot of times it would escalate. 
Our mom used to flip because we used to destroy clothes every 
night. Most of the time he had his crowd and I had mine. My friends 
were guys that were into watching movies, and we were deeply into 
the Three Stooges. We’d go around with Three Stooges haircuts: 
one guy had a Curly crew cut, I would secretly put my hair down in 
bangs like Moe as soon as I left the house, and the other guy had a 
Larry-kind-of wig that his ma had rigged up for him. We pretended 
we really were them. I got jny dad to buy me a 1931 Chevy. We’d 
get in there and smack each other around in this old car. It was 
perfect. We’d act out bits pretending cops were chasing us and we’d 
throw pjes. Whereas my brother’s friends, they were into forging 
notes from home so they could go to the gas station and buy 
cigarettes. When he was ten years old he’d steal things from the 
drug store. “Hey where did you gel all that candy? Where'd you get 
those baseball cards when you don't have any money?” His crowd 
was into getting in trouble. They never got busted though. They’d 
throw rocks through windows and push people’s winter wood 
supplies down the hill. He was the one who ran away from home a 
few times, hopped a freight train and realized, “Hey wait a minute, 
it's cold, it’s getting dark, we better get off this thing." He jumped 
off, slipped and hurt his back and looked up and his hands were 
inches from the train wheels going forty miles an hour. 

■ So the band name was your idea? 

■ Yeah, we were sitting around the band house on Forest Court 
trying to think of a name. We had a summer sublet from these 
fraternity guys who had left all their possessions there, all their 
shirts perfectly packaged up, everything ready for when they came 
back to school. We never washed dishes, eventually the kitchen got 
closed off, and the screcned-in back porch was up to our chests in 
garbage. We didn’t realize that there was such a thing as a kitty 
litter box so the kitty kinda free-pissed and shit all over the house. 
We were sitting upstairs and we had just taken some acid and 
smoked a joint and decided that we had to think of a band name right 
then. So I said, “Hey it’s like we’re the Three Stooge? now, we’ve 
got long hair, we get chased out of restaurants, college kids are 
throwing beer cans at us and trying to run us over!” Just ’cause of 
the way we looked. I’d be walking down State Street in 1967 and all 
of a sudden, “Whoa!” Full beer cans would come sailing at my head. 
And then they’d try to run you down. It was a real problem just 




/V'YOfc' tVYU*S 


to be rock guys’/ 


because of the long hair. We were some of the first to have long 
hair around here. There were only a few others, a few students, and 
Jerry Youngkins, who had the Magic Veil Lightshow at the Grande 
and looked like Wild Bill Hickcock. Now he has a shaved head and 
puts out survivalist videos. I first met him at the Michigan Union 
cafeteria, we’d go in there and that’s where all the longhairs and 
people from Detroit would come in. That’s how I first started 
meeting Iggy besides the hallway at school. It was just a casual nod 
because he had a little Beatle haircut. 

Anyway, at the Forest Court house is where we got our name. I was 
like, “Wow, we’re gcttin’ high on acid—Psychedelic Stooges!” 
Everyone was going, “Boing!” It just turned lights on, everyone 
knew that was it. Later Elektra asked us to drop the “Psychedelic” 
’cause that was a little weird. 

■ What happened when the frat guys came back? 

■ The house smelled like a litter box, and everything that we 
accumulated garbage-wise was there from day one til the last day. 


Iggy got into the closets and wore the guys’ shirts, all of them, but 
we didn’t steal anything. Finally, the guys were coming back and 
we had to get out of there. Dave Alexander was still half-asleep and 
we were trying to pack and leave. He ended up putting his suitcase 
through this huge, old stained-glass window at the top of the stairs. 
The last thing we did was Iggy and I wrote “Hi what’s happening?" 
on plates in mustard and left them on the mantel. We didn’t get 
caught initially but we avoided that side of town. One day a few 
months later I was with Iggy and we’d sort of forgotten about it, and 
then we heard, “Hey there are those fuckin' guys!" They took off, 
one after me and one after Iggy, but we ended up losing them. They 
wanted to beat our asses! 

■ What were the early shows like? 

■ We used to invent our own instruments. We’d start the show with 
a blender with a little water in it and about fifteen minutes before 
we’d play we put a microphone in there and turn it on. People’d be 
like, “What the hell is that?” We also had a thing called the “Jim-a- 



phone” which was nothing but a large funnel. You’d put a 
microphone on a stand, and by lowering and raising the funnel 
you'd get different kinds of feedback. Iggy had golf shoes with a 
washboard with a contact mic on the washboard. He’d get on the 
washboard and do some fancy steps. Dave Alexander's first job in 
the Stooges was to take a Kustom amplifier with a reverb unit in it, 
pick up the amp head and keep crashing it down, to make weird 
sounds. 

Our first show was at the Grande. Iggy wore a nightshirt from the 
turn of the century. He took a piece of cardboard and corkscrewed 
strips of aluminum foil into it so that he had an aluminum foil afro, 
then he shaved his eye brows and painted his face white. We drove 
to the gig looking like that in Dave Alexander's Corvair. This is 
really the truth: cars tried to ran us off the road. A whole bunch of 
guys pulled up next to us yelling, “What the fuck is that?” And they 
wanted to kill us! When we got to the Grande, the neighbors were 
saying things like, “Motherfucker, what is that? Some kind of a 
mechanical man!” It was funny and we were into it but we were 
embarrassed and kind of scared at the same time. We played for 
fifteen minutes, that was all our set was, and of course there was no 
applause. Usually we basically just got up there and jammed one riff 
and built into an energy freak-out, until finally we’d broken a guitar 
or one of my hands would be twice as big as the other and my guitar 


“...they used 

lousy 

would be covered in blood. I wouldn’t even realize it at the time I 
was doing it. A lot of our shows were like that until we started 
finding little bits that were starting to get more musical. We 
stopped using the homemade instruments when we realized we 
wanted to get better and make records. I played “lead bass” for a 
while, and then we got Dave to play the bass and I switched over to 
guitar. When we first signed with Elektra, we only had three or four 
songs, which were just the chords to “Little Doll” and the riff to 
“No Fun” and the riff to “I’m Loose,” and we just sort of jammed 
those same three things and we'd wind up freaking out on each one 
of them, getting weird. We wound up going to New York to do the 
recording session. They listened to it and thought it was too short, 
so they asked if we had more material. We were like, “Oh yeah, 
sure,” but we didn’t. So I wrote “Little Doll,” “Not Right," and 
“Real Cool Time,” in about an hour. I swear, each one of ’em was 
one take. We got in a big hassle with John Cale because he walks 
into the session and there are our Marshall full stacks, hundred watt 
heads, everything cranked on ten. “Okay, record us!” He got really 
mad, and said we’d have to have small amps, that we couldn't record 
with that set-up. So we had a sit down strike, we just sat down and 
started smokin’ dope until he saw it our way. So our first recording 
session was our album. Iggy had done some stuff with the Iguanas 
but it was our first. 

■ So then you discovered free jazz? 

■ Well John Sinclair introduced us to Coltrane, and we loved it. I 
still listen to him now, it’s some of my favorite stuff. We got Steve 
Mackay from the Charging Rhinoceros of Soul and Carnal Kitchen 
to play saxophone because we liked the Coltrane stuff and wanted to 
have better freakouts at the ends of songs. Steve lasted a fair 
amount of time but we sort of dropped him because when we went on 
tour it was just fun for him, ’cause he only had to play a couple 
songs. By then, after the second album, things were winding down 
anyway. He ended up playing with an acoustic trio made up of 
junkies. (The Violent Femmes-ed.) 

■ Were you tight with the MCS? 

■ We did a lot of jobs with them. As a matter of fact, the first time 
the Grande opened to the public, it was the MC5 and the Chosen 
Few, and I was in the Chosen Few with Scott Richardson, who went 
on to lead SRC. That was our high school band. I actually did play 
the first note ever at the Grande. We did this Stones medley, and the 
first one was "Everybody Needs Somebody.” I played bass in that 
band. That’s when I first met James Williamson. And that was 
James’ last gig with the Chosen Few, because his parents were 
shipping his ass out to a school in New York. 

Anyway, we met John Sinclair through our shows at the Grande, 
and when they had their band house in Detroit we would drive out 
there and practice.Then one time when they were on the road and all 
their women were at home, some people busted in and raped a 
couple girls and stole a bunch of stuff, so they said, “That’s it, 
Detroit’s just too dangerous.” They decided to move here to Ann 
Arbor. I think that I was the first guy ever to fuck a girl in the White 
Panther house, unless John beat me to it. 

Dennis Thompson told me later that they all used to think I was a 
lousy guitar player. I liked Rob Tyner (ne Robert Derminer — ed.) 
’cause he wasn’t as macho as the other guys. Wayne Kramer (nd 
Wayne Kambes — ed.) and Thompson would sit around and see who 
could drink ’til they dropped. I liked Mike Davis because he was the 
most easygoing. I’d wind up hanging out with Mike because he was 
more into the women. Once I lent him my leather jacket and my 



to think I was a 
guitar player.” 


Firebird Bass. A couple months later, I asked him where my jacket 
and guitar were, and he said, “Well the jacket got stolen and I 
smashed the guitar onstage.” This was the original bass I played in 
the Chosen Few and the Stooges. Wayne Kramer got an old crummy 
guitar and they took ’em like baseball bats and squared off onstage 
and smashed the bodies together. I was like, “Thanks a million, 
pal. I loved that guitar!" But I always got on well with Mike. At the 
MC5 house if you brought any beer or pot over everyone was like, 
“Alright, give it up man!” We hated that. So Mike told us to put it 
outside his bedroom window in the bushes and we'd reach out and 
get it later. 

■ Was there friction between the political types and 
you guys? 

■ Well, we were pretty much good-time-guys. We never really got 
involved. We did some benefits but we never sold Black Panther 
papers on the street or anything like that. We just wanted to be rock 
guys. We thought that it was neat that they wanted to make things 
better for people, and we liked the freedom and the natural things 
that came with the '60s, but we were mostly into sex and smoking 
dope and playing music. None of us had licenses at that time. We 
were like,“Fuck the license bureau, fuck the draftboard!” We were 
only political in that sense. 

■ How did you deal with the draft? 

■ We all got out. I had just seen The Caine Mutiny the night 
before I went in, so I stayed up on speed and took a pair of dice with 
me. I told them I was a homosexual, that I had nervous disorders, 
and then I didn’t fill out the forms correctly, to show that I could 



Destroy All Monsters, 1978 



Asheton, 1990 


function as a human being. I refused to take the physical, so they 
sent me right downstairs to the psychiatrist, and then to a private 
doctor. It turned out that the doctor was gay and when he got me up 
on that table he whipped my pants down and just grabbed my balls 
really hard. After that, I went outside, and though I’m not normally 
a destructive person, I tore antennas off cars and found a rock and 
smashed in all the parking meters down the whole street. I got out 
though. My brother just went fucked up; he drank a pint of whisky 
and popped a bunch of reds. He went in and said, “G.I. honky 
motherfucker!” He was saluting everybody. They sent him to the 
shrink and he wound up puking on his desk. The worst part was he 
was out in record time. He would have won our bet on who got out 
the fastest, but he went over to the church across the street and was 
so loaded he passed out. He was arrested by the cops for vagrancy 
and thrown in jail. Iggy was there for a couple of hours, but Dave 
won. At the time he had long Brian Jones hair and he cut super short 
bangs so he had a page boy. He put make-up on, took a lot of drugs, 
refused to take the physical and just acted extremely weird. They 






Iggy, above, pre-Ashetons (as a '64 Pioneer High debate 
team member, in the top row, second from right), and 
post-Ashetons (with the Stooges in '70.) 


(Mom enters, insists that she smells someimng 

burning) ... 

Nothing’s burning, Ma. I don t smell anything burning. 

So I just had a couple puffs of something and headed back to my 
room and there’s a blood smear from the top of the wall and there s 
Iggy, he’d cracked his head on the side of the wall going back to his 
room and just sort of passed out. I took him to his room and there s 
this inch-wide split, open to the skull. So I kind of squeezed it back 
together with a bunch of bandages and told him he should see a 
doctor but he said no way. He had his hair dyed blonde so the next 
day in the car I was sitting behind him, looking at his matted 
bloody blonde hair all the way to Atlanta. 

■ RON’S MOM: Are you the only one smoking? 

■ Look, I’m sure nothing's burning. The ash tray’s here and I 
haven’t dropped any butts 

Iggy kind of lost his sense of humor. He wasn t ever particularly 
funny, but he was a fun-loving person. He was a straight-guy, good- 
student-tvpe, on student council. He was even wearing straight 
clothes—sweaters and madras shorts—until he met us and we kind 
of toughened him up. 

■ Did you make fun of him? 

■ Yeah. It wasn’t like we tortured him or anything, but he started 
changing the way he dressed after meeting us. We were really 
important in changing him, because he really was shy and straight, 
so we’d all just kind of joke around when we were high, like. Look 
at all those ugly people at the Burger King! They’re the freaks, 
we’re not the freaks!" But over the years his sense of humor was just 
drained. Whenever I see him he’s just got that big frown all the 
time. He doesn't call and I don’t have his number. I don t care it 1 
talk to him, to tell you the truth. It’d be all right, but I’m not gomg 
to go seek him out or anything. The whole thing kind of ended on a 
weird note. 

■ How do you feel in light of Iggy’s comparative 

success? ... „ , , . 

■ Of course I feel a little bit of jealousy. I don t really hate him. 
He’s got talent and he did have a lot of breaks. There have been a lot 
of different record companies, and David Bowie bailed him out a 
couple of times. He got a lot of help, and more power to him. That s 


smells something 


PHOTO COURTESY OF MR. KEVIN PLAMONDON 


weird. They took one look at him and he was gone. He got out in a 

half hour. . ,. 

■ You mentioned earlier that things were winding 

down after the second album 

■ Weird junk stuff started happening, but the worst was alter iggy 
started believing the press. People kept saying “You’re the one, 
you’re the star,” and he started believing it. I was sitting right there 
in my own apartment, and people were going, “You don t need 
these guys, they don’t play that well, you should dump 'em and get 
a really good band, cause you're the only one anyone really cares 
about.” He had all those people telling him all that stuff and he 
started breaking down. It was very stressful, it was the old 
syndrome of "I’ve got to top myself every night.” You can t go and 
play for two years almost every night, jumping into the audience, 
getting banged up and getting stitches. The drugs really started 
fucking him up and he just got burned out. Once in Flonda we were 
on a bill with J. Geils, and afterwards we wound up meeting with 
Peter Wolf, who said, “What do you want to get high on. So he 
sends the roadie out and he comes back with a doctor's attache case 
full of drugs.... 






fine. When he goes out and plays those Stooges songs, it keeps the 
Stooges stuff alive. So finally after 20 years I can make some 
money off of it because of royalties. And it is because of him being 
out there that I'm doing that stuff. And hopefully it makes people 
wonder what ever happened to the other guys in the band, so my 
new projects have a better chance of being seen. 

■ What do you think of James Williamson? 

■ I liked him at first, but then he got real power-tiippy, arrogant, 
and snotty. He was the other guitarist in the last double-guitar 
Stooges lineup, before we broke up the first time. When we got 
back together it was supposed to be temporary that I would play 
bass and then we’d go to two guitar players. It went to his head or 
something. He wanted to be Keith Richards to Iggy's Mick Jagger. 
He treated us really badly and he had this girlfriend who always 
caused a stink at the band house. 

■ What was she like? 

■ A rich bitch, that’s even where that song came from. There’s 
nothing worse than someone sticking their nose into band 
business and it would make us all so furious. She would make stupid 
suggestions about clothing or how a song should go a certain way. 
The worst part is that she was living in the band house and there 
were lots of other girls there, so she thought she was queen of tire 
house. Her friends would fight and there'd be weird shit. We’d be at 
practice and there’d be a phone call for James and it would be her 
and he’d have to leave practice to go back to the house and 
straighten things out. It was just a pain in the ass. Even worse is 
when she'd be sitting right there at practice. 

■ Were girlfriends an ongoing problem? 

■ Not really. Usually everyone was really good about it. Heavy 
involvement while you’re in the band was forbidden. You’re like a 
soldier: you can have all the casual sex you want on the road, but 
don’t let the girl rule or start changing you. My girlfriend did help 
me out in the end though, because when those guys became heavy 
junkies we had our own apartment where we weren't doing drugs. I 
had someone who was straight with all the other madness going on. 
Equipment was disappearing everyday, being traded for drugs. I’d go 
down to the practice room and the electric piano was gone, the echo 
unit was gone, the little practice amp—they all started 
disappearing. Iggy was trading them. It was like, “Hey Ron, your 
amp went for 20 dollars worth of heroin.” The room that was their 
true shooting gallery was just off my apartment. They’d sit at this 
big round table, they’d draw some blood, and squirt it. The whole 
ceiling was covered in blood. They’d sit there with their syringes 
and just shoot blood at the ceiling, it was horrible, really creepy. 
I’d come downstairs and there’s a crooked trail of something that 
was on fire dragged through the kitchen, through the practice room, 
out the door. Somebody had nodded off in the basement on their 
mattress and something caught fire. One time I luckily came down 
and there’s Iggy nodded out with a lit Lucky Strike and it was 
already starting to bum his lip! I had to be on alert 24 hours and I’d 
make periodical sweeps of the house just to make sure it wasn’t on 
fire. 

I was never into heroin or downers. In the early days I did some 
hits of acid, and of course everyone enjoyed smoking that 
marijuana. The first time Iggy and Scotty ever did heroin was with 
Funkadelic, and at first it was all just experimentation. Everyone 
was handling things well, but their downfall, and indirectly mine, 
was that we got a new road manager named John Adams, and it 
turned out that he was a junkie. He got everyone else to snort it at 
first. I don’t even know when the time came or how it happened, but 
the next thing I knew they started shooting up. Everything started 
getting really weird. Practices stopped happening, we were getting 
less jobs, and everybody would be off in their little hole in a heroin 
dream world. We used to have this thing we used to do every night, 
we’d all get together and we’d have ‘TV Room.” We’d just sit and 
watch TV and have jokes, and there were always favorite chairs, and 
once you got out of that chair to piss or whatever, you’d lose it. So 
then we got into calling "No Musical Chairs!” but that still didn't 
work, so it'd be a contest of seeing how long you could hold the 
piss. My brother and Dave would have contests over how many 
non-stop toke pipes they could toke. Dave had the record of like 
120. We would just sit around and have a good time and be a group. 

A friend called and told me that he’d recently seen Iggy on a 



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college culture tour. He comes up on stage and plays guitar, then he 
puts on some Tibetan music, a little Coltrane. some blues, and the 
Stooges, to show how those different kinds of music were related. 
He said “The best times I ever had in my musical career were when 
we had a band in a house. I recommend to any of you people that 
want a band, get your band together and get a band house, and hang 
out” 

But around the second album that stopped happening. I was sort of 
x-ed out, and it was just the junkies that would be together. Then 
finally, that was it, heroin broke up the band. Iggy was so fucked- 
up he had to stop. He eventually cleaned up enough to go to New 
York, and he just happened to be at the right place at the right time. 
David Bowie happened to be there, so they met, and the next day 
they went over to Columbia and got him a record deal. And he went 
over to England and took James Williamson. I remember how upset 
I was. He didn’t even tell me this was going on. I just happened to 
hear about a party at the SRC studio out on Morgan Road and they 
were there. He was going “Oh yeah, by the way, James and I are 
leaving for England in a couple days.” It was like someone just hit 
me over the head with a baseball bat. He didn’t even tell us. If I 
hadn’t gone to the party I would’ve probably read about it in a 
magazine or something. But it didn’t work out because he called up 
and said how would you and your brother like to come out and play? 
After they’d auditioned hundreds of English bass players and 
drummers. “Oh, thanks a lot, after you go through everybody in 
England, then you call us up.” And then he was still going to call it 
the Stooges. Yeah right. 

■ So you went to England, came back, and lived in 
L.A. 

■ Yeah. When I first moved out to L.A. I was living at the Hyatt 
House. I used to go in the bar every night to have a drink and listen 
to the weird jazz combo and stuff. One night William Shamer was 
there, and he was really drunk. I wanted to talk to him but he kept 
looking at me like I thought he wanted to pick me up or something. 

I was like “Whoa! I'm gettin' out of here, man!” It sort of freaked me 
out cause he was really fucked up. He wanted me to sit down. He 
didn’t chase me around Hollywood, like Michael Davis always tells 
people, but he got kind of grabby, and I thought, “Nah, Captain 
Kirk can't be a fag.” I felt really awful. Probably if I'd have been 
drinking I would have sat down just for the weirdness of seeing what 
would happen. 

When we were in L.A. we hung out with these friends of a friend, 
and they lived right on the water in Malibu. I kept saying how this 
house down the beach was really dynamite. They told me that it was 
owned by Raymond Burr, and if you go there in the morning you 
can see him coming out in a satin dressing gown with a big boa 
around his neck and high heel slippers and I was like, “You guys are 
full of shit!” So we went down there one morning and there he was 
sitting at a little table having his tea and reading a newspaper 
wearing women's stuff. 

■ Did you talk to him? 

■ No way! 

■ What’s the deal with your Nazi stuff? 

■ I started collecting it when I was ten years old, and I’ve amassed 
a pretty good collection. What got me interested was this show 
called The Twentieth Century. The Nazis always had cool uniforms, 
with the big eagle and stuff. I didn’t like what they stood for, but I 
liked what they wore. I’m definitely against the killing of people 
and stuff, but I've gotten in trouble for wearing my gear. My 
comeback was always, “Better some crazy rock and roll guy wearing 
it than guys on the street wearing it for real. Otherwise there would 
be no rock show!” I always used to wear a black velvet armband 
over the swastika when I came out in full S.S. gear, but one night 
Iggy just ripped the velvet part off, showing the Nazi armband. 
Afterwards I get a call from Danny Sugarman,’cause news of this had 
spread all over the place. We were scheduled to play the Academy of 
Music with KISS and Blue Oyster Cult, and Danny said, “I just saved 
your ass! The Jewish Defense League was gonna beat the shit out of 
you at the show tonight, so I donated a hundred dollars to them in 
your name.” But of course Iggy still wanted me to wear the S.S. 
jacket that night. 

Mostly our hassles were from college jocks, or else there would be 
just complete loonies at our shows. After one show this big guy 




with a stick, who had been hassling us from the wings, came 
outside as we were loading out. Of course Iggy, who was the last to 
get in the car, had to confront him. So they’re face to face, and Iggy 
spits a monster hocker in this guy’s face. The guy goes to lift his 
stick, Iggy jumps in, the stick comes down and misses, and the car 
takes off. We go up to make a U turn and the guy is standing in the 
middle of the street with the stick. The road manager just punched 
the gas and goes, “Either he’s gonna move or I'm gonna hit him.” 
At the last minute the guy jumped out of the way. 

Another time I came off stage and the next thing I know I’m on 
the floor 'cause someone just cold-cocked me. Then my brother was 
beating the guy’s head against the wall. I don't know if it was 
perhaps the Nazi stuff. I wasn’t wearing that much stuff. I always 
wore the iron cross, and I always wore that white S.S. parade belt 
but I stopped wearing the S.S. jacket, because things got too weird. 

Once we were getting on a plane and I was wearing my S.S. 
uniform. It didn’t have any swastikas or S.S. bolts or anything like 
that, but it did have the cuff band that said “Adolf Hitler” on it! The 
next thing I knew, the pilot was standing there glaring at me. I was 
surprised because usually they wouldn't let Iggy on the plane 
because he was filthy or he had tom pants or he still had silver 
make-up from his hair and glitter all over. Then the stewardess 
comes back and goes, “I’m responsible for you. The pilot wanted to 
kick you off the plane because he thought you were some Nazi guy. 
But I said that you seem like a nice guy so I vouched for you.” That 
was starting the tour off, so I decided not to wear the jacket 
anymore. 

■ Do you collect guns? 

■ Yep. I've got some neat guns, including an A.K. 47. I’m a three- 
year member of the N.R.A. and I go shooting at a place in 
Manchester, Ml. When I was in the Boy Scouts I had medals for 
shooting. 

■ When did you make the transition from Boy Scouts 
to rock and roll? 

■ My dad wanted me to be a Marine Corps flyer, ’cause that’s what 
he was, but when I was 15 I got glasses. In those days you weren’t 
allowed to wear glasses and fly. So his dreams were shattered but he 
was like, “Well you can still be 18 and be a sergeant and be in 
command of three tanks.” While he was still alive, my brother was 
looking at the Sunday magazine going, “Wow look at this. The 
Beatles! Look at these guys!" He kept sticking the picture in my 
face and I kept saying,“Get those faggots away from me, man!" I 
finally grabbed the picture away from Scotty and flushed it down the 
toilet. Then my father died, and I knew I would no longer be 
groomed to be in the military. So I just started loosening up, and I 
learned to love The Beatles because they started the whole thing off 
for me. So I fell hard for it; my sister got the Beatles record and I 
started listening to it. Then we moved into this house and I’d see 
Dave Alexander; he lived down the street and he was the first guy I 
knew whose parents allowed him to have a full Beatle haircut. He 
liked George Harrison so he got whatever haircut George had and I 
liked John so I got whatever John had. Dave was just a year older 
but he had all the records and an electric guitar. The first time I went 
over there we were listening to the Beatles and he asked his mom to 
bring us something to drink, and she brought up three Colt 45s. I 
was 16 and I got bombed. We’d just spend all afternoon smoking 
cigarettes and playing to the same records over and over, "The Bells 
Of Rhymney” by the Byrds and “We’ll Take Our Last Waltz 
Tonight” by the Beau Brummels. We thought we were great, so we 
were like, “Okay let’s do it without the record,” but we couldn’t play 
it without the record. 

Later we went to England for a month. Every day we’d take the 
train into Liverpool in time to catch the 1:00 session at the Cavern 
Club. “Whoa! We’re going right to where the Beatles started out!” 
We saw the Who. “My Generation” was just out and it was just 
catching on. We heard that and we went “Wow!” I got a piece of the 
twelve string that Townsend busted that night, and our friend Brian 
went and cut off a piece of the rope from the bathroom, saying, 
“Yep, this is from the rope the Who pulled when they had to take a 
shit!” When I came back I had long sideburns and boots with Cuban 
heels, a leather jacket and a turtleneck. Going to England was the 
end of any thoughts of any kind of regular life. I knew right then 
and there that I didn’t ever want a job. ■ 



t* 






MURDER. 


Available from Restless Records on 
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ALBUM 7 71578-1 CA3SETTB 7 71578-A COMPACT DISC 7 71376-1 


D.O.A. 


" These guys manage to salt down 
their fierce idealism with a little 
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Canada 

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